Hui Zhang

Northwest A & F University · Department of Basic Veterinary Medicine

Objective Huangqi Decoction (HQD), a classical traditional Chinese medicine formula, has been used as a valid treatment for alleviating liver fibrosis; however, the underlying molecular mechanism is still unknown. Although our previous studies showed that microRNA-663a (miR-663a) suppresses the proliferation and activation of hepatic stellate cells...

Research Objectives Rolling manipulation (RM), a myofascial release technique, is the most popular technique in Traditional Chinese Medicine manipulation (TCMM) to treat skeletal muscle injury. The research is to identify potential mechanisms of TCMM alleviating impaired human skeletal muscle cells (HSkMCs) that is based on the changes in related b...

Background Traditional Chinese medicine manipulation (TCMM) is often used to treat human skeletal muscle injury, but its mechanism remains unclear due to difficulty standardizing and quantifying manipulation parameters. Methods Here, dexamethasone sodium phosphate (DSP) was utilized to induce human skeletal muscle cell (HSkMC) impairments. Cells i...

Context Xiaoyaosan decoction (XYS), a classical Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) formula is used to treat liver fibrosis in clinics. Objective This study explores defined compound combinations from XYS decoction to treat liver fibrosis. Materials and methods Network pharmacology combined with transcriptomics analysis was used to analyze the XYS...

Background: Liver fibrosis leads to loss of liver function. Xiaoyaosan decoction (XYS) as a classical Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) formula is used to treatment liver fibrosis in clinical and alleviated CCl4-induced liver fibrosis in our previous study. Xiaoyaosan decoction was composed of many ingredients, and the active ingredients is not cl...

Glycyrrhetinic acid (GA), a hydrolysate of glycyrrhizic acid from licorice root extract, has been used to treat liver fibrotic diseases. However, the molecular mechanism involved in the antifibrotic effects of GA remains unclear. The involvement of miR-663a and its roles in TGF-β-1-induced hepatic stellate cell (HSC) activation remains unclear. In...

Ethnopharmacological relevance Liver fibrosis is an outcome of many chronic liver diseases and often results in cirrhosis, liver failure, and even hepatocarcinoma. Xiaoyaosan decoction (XYS) as a classical Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) formula is used to liver fibrosis in clinical practice while its mechanism is unclear. Aim of the study The...

An amendment to this paper has been published and can be accessed via a link at the top of the paper.

Background: In traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) clinical practice, TCM syndromes help to understand human homeostasis and guide individualized treatment. However, the TCM syndrome changes with disease progression, of which the scientific basis and mechanism remain unclear. Methods: To demonstrate the underlying mechanism of dynamic changes in...

The aim of this study was to investigate the alterations of urinary microRNA (miRNA) expression and explore its clinical significance in patients with chronic hepatitis B (CHB). The expression levels of urinary miRNA were detected by miRNA microarray and quantitative reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction (qRT-PCR) from 106 CHB and 40 heal...

Hepatitis B virus (HBV)-induced hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) is a major cause of cancer-related deaths in Asia and Africa. Developing effective and non-invasive biomarkers of HCC for individual patients remains an urgent task for early diagnosis and convenient monitoring. Analyzing the transcriptomic profiles of peripheral blood mononuclear cells...

Liver diseases cause serious public health problems because of their high global prevalence and poor long-term clinical outcomes. With its mild and broad therapeutic efficacy, traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) has played an important role in the prevention and treatment of liver diseases in China for hundreds of years. Tanshinone IIA (TIIA), a maj...

Metastasis is a major cause of death in patients with breast cancer. In the process of cancer development, epithelial-mesenchymal transition (EMT) is crucial to promoting the invasion and migration of tumor cells. In a previous study, the role of resveratrol in migration and metastasis was investigated in MDA-MB-231 (MDA231) human breast cancer cel...

Mounting evidence has shown that long noncoding RNAs (lncRNAs) can function as competing endogenous RNAs (ceRNAs) in distinct physiological and pathological states. The activation of hepatic stellate cells (HSCs) is a critical event in the development of hepatic fibrosis (HF). LncRNAs have recently been revealed to be involved in HSC activation as...

Circulating microRNAs (miRNAs) can be employed as biomarkers to diagnose liver and other diseases. Noninvasive approaches are needed to complement and improve the current strategies for screening for biomarkers liver cirrhosis. We determined whether the serum levels of miRNAs can distinguish between chronic hepatitis B (CHB) and CHB-induced cirrhos...

Hepatitis B is one of most etiologies of Liver cirrhosis in China, and clinically lacks the effective strategy for Hepatitis B caused cirrhosis (HBC) therapy. As a complementary and alternative medicine, Chinese Traditional Medicine (TCM) has special therapeutic effects for HBC. Here, we focus on the evolution process of HBC TCM syndromes, which wa...

Background Curcumin, a natural compound derived from the turmeric rhizome Curcuma longa Linn, has anticancer and chemoresistance reduction biological activities. We evaluated the efficacy of curcumin in sensitizing chemotherapy drugs through regulation of Bcl-2-mediated apoptosis in breast cancer stem-like cells (BCSCs). Methods Cell survival was m...

Human induced pluripotent stem cells (hiPSCs) are capable of unlimited self-renewal and can generate nearly all cells in the body. Changes induced by different LSD1 activities on the regulation of hiPSC self-renewal and differentiation and the mechanism underlying such changes were determined. We used two different LSD1 inhibitors (phenelzine sulfa...

Cancer cells with stem cell-like properties contribute to the development of resistance to chemotherapy and eventually to tumor relapses. The current study investigated the potential of curcumin to reduce breast cancer stem cell (BCSC) population for sensitizing breast cancer cells to mitomycin C (MMC) both in vitro and in vivo. Curcumin improved t...

The transcriptional profile of PC-3 human prostate cancer cells infected with tumor-targeting Salmonella typhimurium A1-R (A1-R) was analyzed with by microarray. PC-3 is highly sensitive to A1-R. Numerous genes involved in diverse cellular processes, including apoptosis, necrotic cell death, neutrophil chemotaxis and innate immunity were significan...

Fuzheng-Huayu (FZHY) tablet was formulated based on Chinese medicine theory in treating liver fibrosis. A clinical trial has indicated that FZHY can against hepatitis B-caused liver cirrhosis (HBC), but the underlying mechanism of FZHY efficacy is unclear. Here, we report that miRNA expression levels are remarkably changed when FZHY formula was use...

Radix Glycyrrhiza has been used in China for thousand years to treat cancer. However, focus on its tumor-suppressing mechanism has been concentrated on its effect on tumor cell growth and apoptosis. With the aid of a panel of human breast cancer cell lines, we reveal that glycyrrhetinic acid (GA), a major component of Radix Glycyrrhiza, is actually...

In breast cancer, metastasis is the main reason for patient mortality. In the present study, we used breast cancer MDA-MB-231 cells and a mouse xenograft model to demonstrate the effect of emodin on the migration, invasion and metastasis of human breast cancer MDA-MB-231 cells and the related mechanisms. In vitro, wound healing and Transwell assays...

In traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) clinical practice, ZHENG (also known as TCM syndrome) helps to understand the human homeostasis and guide individualized treatment. However, the scientific basis of ZHENG remains unclear due to limitations of current reductionist approaches. We collected the leukocyte samples of three hepatitis B-caused cirrhos...

In order to explore the synergistic mechanisms of combinatorial treatment using curcumin and mitomycin C (MMC) for breast cancer, MCF-7 breast cancer xenografts were conducted to observe the synergistic effect of combinatorial treatment using curcumin and MMC at various dosages. The synergistic mechanisms of combinatorial treatment using curcumin a...

Liver cirrhosis is one of the most common non-neoplastic causes of mortality worldwide. Chronic hepatitis B (CHB) is a major cause of liver cirrhosis in China. To find biomarkers for the diagnosis of CHB caused cirrhosis (HBC), we examined the transcriptional profiling of CHB and HBC. The leukocyte samples of CHB (n = 5) and HBC (n = 5) were analyz...

Mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs) can be successfully induced to differentiate into insulin-producing cells （IPCs) by a variety of small molecules and cytokines in vitro. However, problems remain, such as low transdifferentiation efficiency and poor maturity of trans-differentiated cells. The damaged pancreatic cells secreted a large amount of soluble...

Breast cancer remains the leading cause of cancer-related deaths among women. Owing to high efficiency and low toxic effects, further exploration of natural compounds from Chinese herbal medicine may be an efficient approach for breast cancer drug discovery. In this study, we investigated the effects of evodiamine on the growth and metastasis of MD...

Metastasis is the major cause of death in breast cancer patients. In this study, we investigated the effects of baicalin, a natural compound, on migration, invasion and metastasis in the experimental breast cancer in vitro and in vivo and its mechanisms. It was found that baicalin not only dose-dependently inhibits MDA-MB-231 cells migration and in...

Traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) ZHENG as the key pathological principle is to understand the human homeostasis and guide TCM treatment. Here, circulating microRNAs (miRNAs) were utilized to differentiate between ZHENGs including liver-gallbladder dampness-heat syndrome (LGDHS) and liver-kidney yin deficiency syndrome (LKYDS) in chronic hepatitis...

Traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) treatment is regarded as a safe and effective method for chronic hepatitis B (CHB), which requires a traditional diagnosis method to distinguish the TCM syndrome. In this study, we study the differences and similarities among excessive, excessive-deficient, and deficient syndromes, by an integrative and comparativ...

Cancer metastasis is refractory to most forms of chemotherapy. Conventional and alternative drugs, such as Chinese herbal remedies, have been developed to target metastatic cancer cells. In this study, we investigated the effects of PC-SPESII, an herbal formulation, on the migration, invasion, and metastasis of an experimental human breast cancer c...

Traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) treatment is regarded as a safe and effective method for many diseases. In this study, the characteristics among excessive, excessive-deficient, and deficient syndromes of Hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) were studied using miRNA array data. We first calculated the differentially expressed miRNAs based on random mod...

To investigate whether circulating microRNAs (miRNAs) can serve as molecular markers to predict liver injury resulted from chronic hepatitis B (CHB). The profiles of serum miRNA expression were first generated with serum samples collected from 10 patients with CHB and 10 healthy donors (Ctrls) by microarray analysis. The levels of several miRNAs we...

To investigate the differential gene expression profile in two typical traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) syndromes of patients with chronic hepatitis B (CHB), and to find the relationship between TCM syndromes and gene expressions. Patients with CHB were collected from Department of Liver Diseases of Longhua Hospital in Shanghai and diagnosed as d...

Traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) treatment is based on the traditional diagnose method to distinguish the TCM syndrome, not the disease. So there is a phenomenon in the relationship between TCM syndrome and disease, called Same TCM Syndrome for Different Diseases and Different TCM Syndrome for Same Disease. In this study, we demonstrated the mole...

Traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) syndrome, also called ZHENG, is the basis concept of TCM theory. It plays an important role in TCM practice. There are excess and deficiency syndromes in TCM syndrome. They are the common syndromes in chronic hepatitis B (CHB) patients. Here we aim to explore serum protein profiles and potential biomarkers for cla...

To investigate the efficacy of mitomycin C (MMC) in combination with curcumin in suppressing human breast cancer in vitro and in vivo. Human breast cancer MCF-7 cells were used. Cell viability was measured using MTT assay. The cell cycle phase was detected with flow cytometric analysis. Cell cycle-associated proteins were examined using Western blo...

Mitomycin C (MMC) potently suppresses tumour growth. However, its use is limited by its severe toxicity to the kidney and bone marrow. The purpose of this study is to investigate whether the chemoprevention agent curcumin can reduce MMC-associated side-effects and improve MMC efficacy in a breast cancer xenograft model. We first determined the effe...

To investigate the effects of Aidi Injection on the MicroRNAs (miRNA) expression profiles in human breast cancer cells and explore the potential targets of the cancer treatment. MCF-7 breast cancer cells were grown in RPMI 1640 medium supplemented with different concentrations of ADI. The inhibition of cell proliferation was measured by MTT assay....

To study the experimental efficacy of Qushi Huayu Decoction (祛湿化瘀方,QHD) on, protein and gene expression of cathepsin B (ctsb) in HepG2 cells induced by free fatty acids (FFAs). The model of HepG2 steatosis and tumor necrosis factor-α (TNF-α) secretion was induced by long-chain FFAs. HepG2 cells were divided into 4 groups: control group (group C), m...

In this paper, a novel corrugated ground loaded with medium is proposed for enhancing the directivity of circular polarized patch antenna. Different from the suppression of surface wave propagation in the choke grooves, the proposed corrugated structure can modulate surface wave distribution and reradiate parts of surface energy into free space, re...

To examine whether the cell growth inhibitory effect of the combination of baicalin and baicalein is related to apoptosis. Moreover, to determine whether the expression of some apoptosis-related proteins is regulated by the ERK/p38 MAPK pathway. Cell viability was measured using a 3-(4,5-dimethylthiazol-2-yl)-2, 5-diphenyltetrazolium bromide (MTT)...

To investigate the relationship between single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) of interleukin-10 (IL-10) and syndrome types of traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) in posthepatitis B cirrhosis. The genotypes of IL-10-592 A/C, -819 C/T and -1082 G/A sites were determined by polymerase chain reaction-restriction fragment length polymorphism (PCR-RFLP),...

Mitomycin C (MMC), a chemotherapeutic agent in breast cancer treatments, inhibits tumor growth through DNA cross-linking and breaking, but it has severe side effects. Here we examined whether and how curcumin reduced the side effects of MMC. We found that combination treatment with MMC and curcumin reduced tumor weight by 70% and 36% compared with...

Aberrant expression of microRNAs (miRNAs) is involved in the development of breast cancer. This study was to explore differential expression of miRNAs between breast cancer cells and mammary epithelial cells, and to predict potential targets of the differentially expressed miRNAs. Human breast cancer MCF-7 cells and normal human mammary epithelial...

To observe the effect of curcumin on protein kinases on cell signal pathway in breast cancer cell MCF-7. The suppressive effect of curcumin on MCF-7 cell proliferation as different concentration and at different time points were observed by MTT assay; The activity of p-ERK, p-NF-kappaB, p-p38 and p-JNK were observed by western blot. The suppressive...

To study the mechanism of Qushi Huayu Decoction (QHD), a compound of traditional Chinese herbal medicine, in prevention and treatment of non-alcoholic steatohepatitis (NASH). Thirty-five Wistar male rats were randomly divided into normal group, untreated group, QHD group and Ganle (diisopropylamine dichloroacetate) group. The rats except those in n...

To establish an in vitro model applicable for fatty liver lipotoxicity pharmacological research. HepG2 cells were cultured with rat serum instead of fetal bovine serum and with long-chain free fatty acid (FFA) added. The tested indices were: the content of serum TNFa, cellular triglycerides (TG) content, Oil Red staining and ultrastructural changes...

To study the effects of Qushi Huayu Decoction (QHD) contained serum on fatty deposition and tumor necrosis factor alpha (TNF-alpha) secretion of hepatic lipotoxicity model in vitro, for further investigating the mechanism of the decoction for preventing and treating fatty liver. The steatosis with TNF-alpha secretion lipotoxic model of HepG2 induce...

Objective To study the intervention effects of Jianpi Liqi Huoxue Decoction (健脾理气活血汤, JLHD) on lipid peroxidative liver injury induced by alcohol. Methods The rat alcoholic model of liver disease (ALD) induced by Lieber DeCarli liquid diet was established. Thirty two male SD rats were randomly divided into 4 groups: the normal group (n=5), the cont...