Mechanisms of the gut-lung axis in regulating lung metastasis of colorectal cancer and advances in traditional Chinese medicine intervention

Figure 5 A transmutation road diagram from gut-lung axis study to clinical utilization. Key stages include: Phase A: Multiple omics measurement to identify biological markers; phase B: Pre-clinical experiment examination of traditional Chinese medicine intervening measures in orthotopic models; phase C: Biological marker verification in forward-looking cohort groups; and phase D: The design of randomized controlled experiments that include lung metastasis-free survival time as the main observation endpoint. LPS: Lipopolysaccharide; F. nucleatum: Fusobacterium nucleatum; EMT: Epithelial-mesenchymal transition; Th17: T helper 17; Treg: Regulatory T; TCM: Traditional Chinese medicine; AUC: Area under the curve; ROC: Receiver operating characteristic; RCT: Randomized controlled trial; FMT: Fecal microbiota transplantation.