Research Paper|Volume 13, Issue 3|pp 4605—4616

Resveratrol alleviates bleomycin-induced pulmonary fibrosis via suppressing HIF-1α and NF-κB expression

Zaiyan Wang¹, Xiaoning Li¹, Hao Chen¹, Li Han¹, Xiaobin Ji¹, Qiubo Wang¹, Li Wei¹, Yafang Miu¹, Jing Wang¹, Jianfeng Mao¹, Zeming Zhang¹

¹Department of Respiratory Medicine, Shanghai University of Medicine and Health Sciences Affiliated Zhoupu Hospital, Shanghai 201318, China

* Equal contribution

Received: August 21, 2020Accepted: November 27, 2020Published: January 20, 2021

https://doi.org/10.18632/aging.202420

Copyright: © 2021 Wang et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY 3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

Abstract

The absence of a gold standard for treating pulmonary fibrosis makes its management challenging. We established a rat model to study the effect of resveratrol (Res) on bleomycin-induced pulmonary fibrosis. Rats were randomly divided into control, model, low-Res, middle-Res, high-Res, and dexamethasone groups and treated with various concentrations of these drugs. Rats showed typical features of pulmonary fibrosis; i.e., alveolitis, fibrous hyperplasia, and fibrosis on days 7, 14, and 28, respectively. Expression of HIF-1α and NF-κB was higher in the middle-Res, high-Res, and dexamethasone groups than in the control group, but was less than that in the model and low Res groups. We conclude that different levels of HIF-1α and NF-κB expression at different stages of pulmonary fibrosis in rats is positively correlated with the disease severity. Furthermore, resveratrol alleviates bleomycin-induced pulmonary fibrosis by suppressing HIF-1α and NF-κB expression, indicating its potential as a promising therapeutic drug candidate.