Acute lung injury therapeutic mechanism exploration for Chinese classic prescription Qingzao Jiufei Decoction by UFLC-MS/MS quantification of bile acids, fatty acids and eicosanoids in rats.

Acute lung injury (ALI) is a common and complex inflammatory disease, which has been reasonably associated with carboxyl-containing metabolites in our preliminary non-targeted metabolomic strategy. Qingzao Jiufei Decoction (QZJFD), a classic prescription, is widely used in the treatment of pulmonary inflammatory injuries. Successively, in this targeted project, to fill in the research gap and exposit the therapeutic mechanism of QZJFD on ALI, considering the structure similarity and bioactivity correlation, 21 bile acids, 11 fatty acids and 19 eicosanoids were profiled simultaneously in plasma, lung, bronchoalveolar lavage fluid, spleen and feces from rats utilizing a novel ultraperformance liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry approach. As a result, potential biomarkers and ALI characteristic metabolomic spectrums were obtained to distinguish different physical states using discriminative similarity threshold as 0.65 for clinical application. After treatment with QZJFD, obvious reversing ability for various biomarker levels was observed in different bio-samples, providing insights into the systemic intervention of QZJFD on ALI by regulating bile acid synthesis, fatty acid synthesis and eicosanoid metabolism. Conclusively, this investigation represented more information on the comprehensive therapeutic action of QZJFD on ALI involving with multi-targets and multi-pathways for clinical application and traditional Chinese medicine modernization.