How Chinese Medicine functions on COVID-19, based on three Chinese Medicine prescriptions with 220-1800 years history

COVID-19 caused a worldwide pandemic and he therapeutic effect of traditional Chinese medicine is exciting and promising, but the unclear biological mechanism and culture differences have led to its limited acceptance and application. This study selected three basic traditional Chinese medicine prescriptions for fighting epidemics with 200-1800 years application history and applied systematic network pharmacology to clarify their biological mechanism. We found that: (1) Five compounds that played a key role in treating virus pneumonia were screened out and showed well molecular docking efficiency with COVID-19. And the core hub gene of all three prescriptions was RB1. (2) In terms of function, the predicted targets of three Chinese medicine prescriptions were abundantly expressed in regulating viral replication cycle, regulating immune and inflammatory response, coagulation function, and cell proliferation functions. (3) Three prescriptions with completely different properties and different herbs showed very similar biological functions, and the same compound may affect the expression of pathway genes in the same or opposite directions, which reflected the two-way regulatory characteristics. This study suggested that Chinese medicine had great potential in the regulation of viral pneumonia cell cycle and immune microenvironment, and indicated the common biological basis of Chinese medicine in treatment of COVID-19.