Luteolin and triptolide: Potential therapeutic compounds for post-stroke depression via protein STAT

Post stroke depression (PSD) is a common neuropsychiatric complication following stroke closely associated with the immune system. The development of medications for PSD remains to be a considerable challenge due to the unclear mechanism of PSD. Multiple researches agree that the functions of gene ontology (GO) are efficient for the investigation of disease mechanisms, and DeepPurpose (DP) is extremely valuable for the mining of new drugs. However, GO terms and DP have not yet been applied to explore the pathogenesis and drug treatment of PSD. This study aimed to interpret the mechanism of PSD and discover important drug candidates targeting risk proteins, based on immune-related risk GO functions and informatics algorithms. According to the risk genes of PSD, we identified 335 immune-related risk GO functions and 37 compounds. Based on the construction of the GO function network, we found that STAT protein may be a pivot protein in underlying the mechanism of PSD. Additionally, we also established networks of Protein-Protein Interaction as well as Gene-GO function to facilitate the evaluation of key genes. Based on DP, a total of 37 candidate compounds targeting 7 key proteins were identified with a potential for the therapy of PSD. Furthermore, we noted that the mechanisms by which luteolin and triptolide acting on STAT-related GO function might involve three crucial pathways, including specifically hsa04010 (MAPK signaling pathway), hsa04151 (PI3K-Akt signaling pathway) and hsa04060 (Cytokine-cytokine receptor interaction). Thus, this study provided fresh and powerful information for the mechanism and therapeutic strategies of PSD.