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Abstract Local injection of anti-inflammatory drugs for osteoarthritis emerged as a promising administration in the clinic, and sustained-release dosage forms have great potential for future therapeutic applications. Controlling the response of patients only in the acute inflammatory phase is currently the focus of therapeutic interventions. To relieve acute pain in patients and to improve the long-term prognosis effect of osteoarthritis treatment, we designed a two-pronged approach in this research: an injectable double-layer microsphere containing a “nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drug - macrophage polarizing factor” was constructed. The results indicated that microspheres could regulate the intra-articular environment by inhibiting local inflammatory cytokine production, promoting macrophage polarization to the M2-phenotype, and increasing the expression of cartilage repair factors. Polymers chosen could govern the biocompatibility of microspheres and control the release sequence of the two drugs. Injection of microspheres into the degenerative articular cavity of rats leads to suppressed inflammation and well-promoted cartilage regeneration.

Despite standard treatment for non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) being surgical resection, cancer recurrence and complications, such as induction of malignant pleural effusion (MPE) and significant postoperative pain, usually result in treatment failure. In this study, an alginate-based hybrid hydrogel (SOG) is developed that can be injected into the resection surface of the lungs during surgery. Briefly, endoplasmic reticulum-modified liposomes (MSLs) pre-loaded with the signal transducer and activator of transcription 3 (STAT3) small interfering RNA and lidocaine hydrochloride are encapsulated in SOG. Once applied, MSLs strongly downregulated STAT3 expression in the tumor microenvironment, resulting in the apoptosis of lung cancer cells and polarization of tumor-associated macrophages towards the M1-like phenotype. Meanwhile, the release of lidocaine hydrochloride (LID) was beneficial for pain relief and natural killer cell activation. Our data demonstrated MSL@LID@SOG not only efficiently inhibited tumor growth but also potently improved the quality of life, including reduced MPE volume and pain relief in orthotopic NSCLC mouse models, even with a single administration. MSL@LID@SOG shows potential for comprehensive clinical management upon tumor resection in NSCLC, and may alter the treatment paradigms for other cancers.

Abstract Methyltransferase-like 3 (METTL3) is the key subunit of methyltransferase complex responsible for catalyzing N6-methyladenosine (m6A) modification on mRNA, which is the most prevalent post-transcriptional modification in eukaryotes. In this study, we utilized online databases to analyze the association between METTL3 expression and various aspects of tumorigenesis, including gene methylation, immunity, and prognosis. Our investigation revealed that METTL3 serves as a prognostic marker and therapeutic target for liver hepatocellular carcinoma (LIHC). Through experimental studies, we observed frequent upregulation of METTL3 in LIHC tumor tissue and cells. Subsequent inhibition of METTL3 using a novel small molecule inhibitor, STM2457, significantly impeded tumor growth in LIHC cell lines, spheroids, and xenograft tumor model. Further, transcriptome and m6A sequencing of xenograft bodies unveiled that inhibition of METTL3-m6A altered genes enriched in SMAD and MAPK signaling pathways that are critical for tumorigenesis. These findings suggest that targeting METTL3 represents a promising therapeutic strategy for LIHC.

Human serum albumin (HSA) is the most abundant protein in plasma and plays an essential physiological role in the human body. Ethanol precipitation is the most widely used way to obtain HSA, and pH and ethanol are crucial factors affecting the process. In this study, infrared (IR) spectroscopy and near-infrared (NIR) spectroscopy in combination with chemometrics were used to investigate the changes in the secondary structure and hydration of HSA at acidic pH (5.6–3.2) and isoelectric pH when ethanol concentration was varied from 0% to 40% as a perturbation. IR spectroscopy combined with the two-dimensional correlation spectroscopy (2DCOS) analysis for acid pH system proved that the secondary structure of HSA changed significantly when pH was around 4.5. What’s more, the IR spectroscopy and 2DCOS analysis showed different secondary structure forms under different ethanol concentrations at the isoelectric pH. For the hydration effect analysis, NIR spectroscopy combined with the McCabe–Fisher method and aquaphotomics showed that the free hydrogen-bonded water fluctuates dynamically, with ethanol at 0–20% enhancing the hydrogen-bonded water clusters, while weak hydrogen-bonded water clusters were formed when the ethanol concentration increased continuously from 20% to 30%. These measurements provide new insights into the structural changes and changes in the hydration behavior of HSA, revealing the dynamic process of protein purification, and providing a theoretical basis for the selection of HSA alcoholic precipitation process parameters, as well as for further studies of complex biological systems.

Plasma-activated water (PAW), obtained by exposing liquid to cold atmospheric plasma (CAP) for a period, has gained widespread attention for its potential as anti-bacterial, anti-infective, anti-cancer and other biological agents. It is important to understand the PAW behavior and express it in a ‘visualization’ form. Near-infrared spectroscopy (NIR) and aquaphotomics were introduced in this study to investigate the PAW spectra to visualize the water molecular species and try to analyze the production and changes of the active substances in PAW. Second-order derivative, PCA and PLS were applied to identify specific peaks to construct the aquagram and reference method for the ROS assay used to prove the spectral results. The results showed that a longer treatment time resulted in greater spectral changes which could be visualized with 12 water matrix coordinates (WAMACS) and the change trends were in accordance with the ROS concentration variations. Furthermore, during PAW sample storage, there were fluctuations in spectral changes, with a general trend of increase, and a gradual decrease in ROS concentration due to active substance reactions in PAW. In conclusion, this study presents a new perspective on examining the water behavior of PAW and offers a new method to explore cold plasma biomedical materials.

Variable (wavelength) selection is essential in the multivariate analysis of near-infrared spectra to improve model performance and provide a more straightforward interpretation. This paper proposed a new variable selection method named binning-normalized mutual information (B-NMI) based on information entropy theory. “Data binning” was applied to reduce the effects of minor measurement errors and increase the features of near-infrared spectra. “Normalized mutual information” was employed to calculate the correlation between each wavelength and the reference values. The performance of B-NMI was evaluated by two experimental datasets (ideal ternary solvent mixture dataset, fluidized bed granulation dataset) and two public datasets (gasoline octane dataset, corn protein dataset). Compared with classic methods of backward and interval PLS (BIPLS), variable importance projection (VIP), correlation coefficient (CC), uninformative variables elimination (UVE), and competitive adaptive reweighted sampling (CARS), B-NMI not only selected the most featured wavelengths from the spectra of complex real-world samples but also improved the stability and robustness of variable selection results.

PurposePrescription refills are long-term prescriptions for chronic patients in stable status, which varies from country to country. A well-established prescription refill system is beneficial for chronic patients’ medication management and facilitates the efficacy of clinical care. Therefore, we carried out a bibliometric analysis to examine the development of this field.SummaryPublications on prescription refills from 1970 to 2021 were collected in the Web of Science Core Collection (WoSCC). Search strategy TS = “prescri* refill*” OR “medi* refill*” OR “repeat prescri*” OR “repeat dispens*” OR TI = refill* was used for search. VOSviewer was applied to visualize the bibliometric analysis. A total of 319 publications were found in WoSCC. Study attention on prescription refills has shown a steady rise but is still low in recent years. The United States was the most productive country, which had the highest total citations, average citations per publication, and the highest H-index, and participated in international collaboration most frequently. The University of California system was the most productive institution. The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs was the institution with the most citations, most average citation, and highest H-index. Sundell was the most productive author, and Steiner J. F. was the most influential author. “Adherence,” “medication,” and “therapy” were the most prominent keywords.ConclusionPublications on prescription refills have increased rapidly and continue to grow. The United States had the leading position in the area. It is recommended to pay closer attention to the latest hotspots, such as “Opioids,” “Surgery,” “Differentiated care,” and “HIV.”

Xinkeshu tablets (XKST), a traditional Chinese patent medicine (CPM), have served in the clinical treatment of cardiovascular diseases (CVDs) for decades. However, its pharmacodyamic material basis was still unclear, and the holistic quality control has not been well established due to the lack of systematic research on the quality markers. In this experiment, the heart rate recovery rate of a zebrafish larva was used to evaluate the traditional pharmacological effect of XKST i.e., antiarrhythmic effect. The HPLC fingerprints of 16 batches of XKST samples were obtained, and antiarrhythmic components of XKST were identified by establishing the spectrum-effect relationship between HPLC fingerprints and heart rate recovery rate of zebrafish larva with orthogonal signal correction and partial least squares regression (OSC–PLSR) analysis. The anticardiovascular disease components of XKST were identified by mapping the targets related to CVDs in network pharmacology. The compounds of XKST absorbed and exposed in vivo were identified by ultra-high performance liquid chromatography Q-Exactive high-resolution mass spectrometry (UHPLC-Q-Exactive HRMS). Based on the earlier studies, combined with five principles for identifying quality markers and verified by a zebrafish arrhythmia model, danshensu, salvianolic acid A, salvianolic acid B, daidzein, and puerarin were identified as quality markers of XKST. In total, 16 batches of XKST samples were further quantified with the method established in this study. Our study laid the foundation for the quality control of XKST. The integrated strategy used in the study of XKST could be applied for the identification and quantification of quality markers of other CPMs as well.

Confusing low-molecular-weight hyaluronic acid (LMWHA) from acid degradation and enzymatic hydrolysis (named LMWHA–A and LMWHA–E, respectively) will lead to health hazards and commercial risks. The purpose of this work is to analyze the structural differences between LMWHA–A and LMWHA–E, and then achieve a fast and accurate classification based on near-infrared (NIR) spectroscopy and machine learning. First, we combined nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR), Fourier transform infrared (FTIR) spectroscopy, two-dimensional correlated NIR spectroscopy (2DCOS), and aquaphotomics to analyze the structural differences between LMWHA–A and LMWHA–E. Second, we compared the dimensionality reduction methods including principal component analysis (PCA), kernel PCA (KPCA), and t-distributed stochastic neighbor embedding (t-SNE). Finally, the differences in classification effect of traditional machine learning methods including partial least squares–discriminant analysis (PLS-DA), support vector classification (SVC), and random forest (RF) as well as deep learning methods including one-dimensional convolutional neural network (1D-CNN) and long short-term memory (LSTM) were compared. The results showed that genetic algorithm (GA)–SVC and RF were the best performers in traditional machine learning, but their highest accuracy in the test dataset was 90%, while the accuracy of 1D-CNN and LSTM models in the training dataset and test dataset classification was 100%. The results of this study show that compared with traditional machine learning, the deep learning models were better for the classification of LMWHA–A and LMWHA–E. Our research provides a new methodological reference for the rapid and accurate classification of biological macromolecules.

Given the labor-consuming nature of model establishment, model transfer has become a considerable topic in the study of near-infrared (NIR) spectroscopy. Recently, many new algorithms have been proposed for the model transfer of spectra collected by the same types of instruments under different situations. However, in a practical scenario, we need to deal with model transfer between different types of instruments. To expand model applicability, we must develop a method that could transfer spectra acquired from different types of NIR spectrometers with different wavenumbers or absorbance. Therefore, in our study, we propose a new methodology based on improved principal component analysis (IPCA) for calibration transfer between different types of spectrometers. We adopted three datasets for method evaluation, including public pharmaceutical tablets (dataset 1), corn data (dataset 2), and the spectra of eight batches of samples acquired from the plasma ethanol precipitation process collected by FT-NIR and MicroNIR spectrometers (dataset 3). In the calibration transfer for public datasets, IPCA displayed comparable results with the classical calibration transfer method using piecewise direct standardization (PDS), indicating its obvious ability to transfer spectra collected from the same types of instruments. However, in the calibration transfer for dataset 3, our proposed IPCA method achieved a successful bi-transfer between the spectra acquired from the benchtop and micro-instruments with/without wavelength region selection. Furthermore, our proposed method enabled improvements in prediction ability rather than the degradation of the models built with original micro spectra. Therefore, our proposed method has no limitations on the spectrum for model transfer between different types of NIR instruments, thus allowing a wide application range, which could provide a supporting technology for the practical application of NIR spectroscopy.

Peanut allergy is becoming a life-threatening disease that could induce severe allergic reactions in modern society, especially for children. The most promising method applied for deallergization is heating pretreatment. However, the mechanism from the view of spectroscopy has not been illustrated. In this study, near-infrared spectroscopy (NIRS) combined with aquaphotomics was introduced to help us understand the detailed structural changes information during the heating process. First, near-infrared (NIR) spectra of Ara h1 were acquired from 25 to 80°C. Then, aquaphotomics processing tools including principal component analysis (PCA), continuous wavelet transform (CWT), and two-dimensional correlation spectroscopy (2D-COS) were utilized for better understanding the thermodynamic changes, secondary structure, and the hydrogen bond network of Ara h1. The results indicated that about 55°C could be a key temperature, which was the structural change point. During the heating process, the hydrogen bond network was destroyed, free water was increased, and the content of protein secondary structure was changed. Moreover, it could reveal the interaction between the water structure and Ara h1 from the perspective of water molecules, and explain the effect of temperature on the Ara h1 structure and hydrogen-bonding system. Thus, this study described a new way to explore the thermodynamic properties of Ara h1 from the perspective of spectroscopy and laid a theoretical foundation for the application of temperature-desensitized protein products.

Precipitation is a key manufacturing unit during the immunoglobulin G (IgG) production, which guarantees the quality of the final product. Ethanol is usually used to purify IgG during the precipitation process, so it is important to monitor the ethanol concentration online. Near-infrared (NIR) spectroscopy is a powerful process analytical technology (PAT) which has been proved to be feasible to determine the ethanol concentration during the precipitation process. However, the NIR model is usually established based on the specific process, so a universal model is needed. And the clarity degree of solution will affect the quality of the spectra. Therefore, in this study an integrated NIR system was introduced to establish a universal NIR model which could predict the ethanol concentration online and determine the end-point of the whole process. First, a spectra acquisition device was designed and established in order to get high-quality NIR spectra. Then, a simple prepared ethanol NIR model was constructed to predict the actual manufacturing process. Finally, the end-point was determined to stop the peristaltic pump when the ethanol concentration reached 20%. The results showed that the spectra quality was good, model prediction was accurate, and process monitoring was accurate. In conclusion, all results indicated that the integrated NIR system could be used to monitor the biopharmaceutical process to help us understand the pharmaceutical process.

Separation power was limited when the conventional high-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) fingerprinting method based on a single column was used to analyze very complex traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) preparations. In this research, a novel HPLC fingerprinting method based on column switching technology by using a single pump was established for evaluating the quality of Tianmeng oral liquid (TMOL). Twelve batches of TMOL samples were used for constructing HPLC fingerprints. Compared with the 16 common peaks in fingerprinting with a single column, 25 common peaks were achieved with two columns connected through a six-way valve. The similarity analysis combined with bootstrap method was applied to determine the similarity threshold, which was 0.992 to distinguish expired samples and unexpired samples. Principal component analysis (PCA) and hierarchical clustering analysis (HCA) were also applied to classify the TMOL samples, and results revealed that expired and unexpired samples are classified into two categories. The HPLC fingerprinting based on column switching technology with better separation power and higher peak capacity could characterize chemical composition information more comprehensively, providing an effective and alternative method to control and evaluate the quality of TMOL, which would offer a valuable reference for other TCM preparations.

Near infrared (NIR) spectroscopy is now widely used in fluidized bed granulation. However, there are still some demerits that should be overcome in practice. Valid spectra selection during modeling process is now a hard nut to crack. In this study, a novel NIR sensor and a cosine distance method were introduced to solve this problem in order to make the fluidized process into “visualization”. A NIR sensor was fixed on the side of the expansion chamber to acquire the NIR spectra. Then valid spectra were selected based on a cosine distance method to reduce the influence of dynamic disturbances. Finally, spectral pretreatment and wavelength selection methods were investigated to establish partial least squares (PLS) models to monitor the moisture content. The results showed that the root mean square error of prediction (RMSEP) was 0.124% for moisture content model, which was much lower than that without valid spectra selection treatment. All results demonstrated that with the help of valid spectra selection treatment, NIR sensor could be used for real-time determination of critical quality attributes (CQAs) more accurately. It makes the manufacturing easier to understand than the process parameter control.

Osteoarthritis (OA) is a degenerative disease, and there is currently no effective medicine to cure it. Early prevention and treatment can effectively reduce the pain of OA patients and save costs. Therefore, it is necessary to diagnose OA at an early stage. There are various diagnostic methods for OA, but the methods applied to early diagnosis are limited. Ordinary optical diagnosis is confined to the surface, while laboratory tests, such as rheumatoid factor inspection and physical arthritis checks, are too trivial or time-consuming. Evidently, there is an urgent need to develop a rapid nondestructive detection method for the early diagnosis of OA. Vibrational spectroscopy is a rapid and nondestructive technique that has attracted much attention. In this review, near-infrared (NIR), infrared, (IR) and Raman spectroscopy were introduced to show their potential in early OA diagnosis. The basic principles were discussed first, and then the research progress to date was discussed, as well as its limitations and the direction of development. Finally, all methods were compared, and vibrational spectroscopy was demonstrated that it could be used as a promising tool for early OA diagnosis. This review provides theoretical support for the application and development of vibrational spectroscopy technology in OA diagnosis, providing a new strategy for the nondestructive and rapid diagnosis of arthritis and promoting the development and clinical application of a component-based molecular spectrum detection technology.

Human albumin (HA) is a very important blood product which requires strict quality control strategy. Acid precipitation is a key step which has a great effect on the quality of final product. Therefore, a new method based on quality by design (QbD) was proposed to investigate the feasibility of realizing online quality control with the help of near infrared spectroscopy (NIRS) and chemometrics. The pH value is the critical process parameter (CPP) in acid precipitation process, which is used as the end-point indicator. Six batches, a total of 74 samples of acid precipitation process, were simulated in our lab. Four batches were selected randomly as calibration set and remaining two batches as validation set. Then, the analysis based on material information and three different variable selection methods, including interval partial least squares regression (iPLS), competitive adaptive reweighted sampling (CARS) and correlation coefficient (CC) were compared for eliminating irrelevant variables. Finally, iPLS was used for variables selection. The quantitative model was built up by partial least squares regression (PLSR). The values of determination coefficients (Rc2 and Rp2), root mean squares error of prediction (RMSEP), root mean squares error of calibration (RMSEC) and root mean squared error of cross validation (RMSECV) were 0.969, 0.953, 0.0496, 0.0695 and 0.0826, respectively. The paired t test and repeatability test showed that the model had good prediction ability and stability. The results indicated that PLSR model could give accurate measurement of the pH value.

At present, Tradition Chinese Medicine (TCM) industry in China is in the stage from the empirical development to industrial production. Near infrared (NIR) spectroscopy has been widely used in the quality control of TCM’s modernization with its characteristics including rapidness, nondestruction, simplicity, economy, and so on. In this study, as one type of a portable micro NIR spectrometer, Micro NIR 1700 was used to establish the qualitative models for identification of geographical region and authenticity of Radix codonopsis based on discriminant analysis (DA) method. Both of the DA models had better predictive ability with 100% accuracy. In addition, a method for rapid quantitative analysis of polysaccharide in Radix codonopsis was also developed based on Micro NIR 1700 spectrometer with partial least-squares (PLS) algorithm. In the PLS calibration model, the NIR spectra of samples were pretreated with different preprocessing methods and the spectral region was selected with different variable selection methods as well. The performance of the final PLS model was evaluated according to correlation coefficient of calibration (Rc), correlation coefficient of prediction (Rp), root mean squared error of cross validation (RMSECV), and root mean squared of prediction (RMSEP). The values of Rc, Rp, RMSECV, and RMSEP were 0.9775, 0.9602, 2.496, and 2.734g/mL, respectively. This work demonstrated that micro infrared spectrometer could be more convenient and rapid for quality control of Radix codonopsis, and the presented models would be a useful reference for quality control of other similar raw materials of TCM.

Near infrared (NIR) spectroscopy has been developed into one of the most important process analytical techniques (PAT) in a wide field of applications. The feasibility of NIR spectroscopy with partial least square regression (PLSR) to monitor the concentration of paeoniflorin, albiflorin, gallic acid, and benzoyl paeoniflorin during the water extraction process of Radix Paeoniae Alba was demonstrated and verified in this work. NIR spectra were collected in transmission mode and pretreated with smoothing and/or derivative, and then quantitative models were built up using PLSR. Interval partial least squares (iPLS) method was used for the selection of spectral variables. Determination coefficients (Rcal2 and Rpred2), root mean squares error of prediction (RMSEP), root mean squares error of calibration (RMSEC), and residual predictive deviation (RPD) were applied to verify the performance of the models, and the corresponding values were 0.9873 and 0.9855, 0.0487mg/mL, 0.0545mg/mL and 8.4 for paeoniflorin; 0.9879, 0.9888, 0.0303mg/mL, 0.0321mg/mL and 9.1 for albiflorin; 0.9696, 0.9644, 0.0140mg/mL, 0.0145mg/mL and 5.1 for gallic acid; 0.9794, 0.9781, 0.00169mg/mL, 0.00171mg/mL and 6.9 for benzoyl paeoniflorin, respectively. The results turned out that this approach was very efficient and environmentally friendly for the quantitative monitoring of the water extraction process of Radix Paeoniae Alba.

As an important process analysis tool, near infrared spectroscopy (NIRS) has been widely used in process monitoring. In the present work, the feasibility of NIRS for monitoring the moisture content of human coagulation factor VIII (FVIII) in freeze-drying process was investigated. A partial least squares regression (PLS-R) model for moisture content determination was built with 88 samples. Different pre-processing methods were explored, and the best method found was standard normal variate (SNV) transformation combined with 1st derivation with Savitzky–Golay (SG) 15 point smoothing. Then, four different variable selection methods, including uninformative variable elimination (UVE), interval partial least squares regression (iPLS), competitive adaptive reweighted sampling (CARS) and manual method, were compared for eliminating irrelevant variables, and iPLS was chosen as the best variable selection method. The correlation coefficient (R), correlation coefficient of calibration set (Rcal), correlation coefficient of validation set (Rval), root mean square errors of cross-validation (RMSECV) and root mean square errors of prediction (RMSEP) of PLS model were 0.9284, 0.9463, 0.8890, 0.4986% and 0.4514%, respectively. The results showed that the model for moisture content determination has a wide range, good linearity, accuracy and precision. The developed approach was demonstrated to be a potential for monitoring the moisture content of FVIII in freeze-drying process.

Evaluation of the batch consistency of traditional Chinese medicines (TCMs) is essential for the promotion of the development and quality control of TCMs. The aim of the present work was to develop a useful strategy via liquid chromatography and chemometrics to evaluate the batch consistency of TCM preparations. Xin-Ke-Shu (XKS) tablet was chosen as a model for this method development. Four types of chromatographic fingerprint approaches were compared by using similarity analysis based on cosine of angel or correlation coefficient. Differences in the fingerprints of 71 batches of XKS tablet were illustrated by hierarchical cluster analysis. Then, Mahalanobis distance was employed for estimating the probability level (P

Hyaluronic acid (HA) concentration is an important parameter in fermentation process. Currently, carbazole assay is widely used for HA content determination in routine analysis. However, this method is time-consuming, environment polluting and has the risk of microbial contamination, as well as the results lag behind fermentation process. This paper attempted the feasibility to predict the concentration of HA in fermentation broth by using near infrared (NIR) spectroscopy in transmission mode. In this work, a total of 56 samples of fermentation broth from 7 batches were analyzed, which contained HA in the range of 2.35–9.69 g/L. Different data preprocessing methods were applied to construct calibration models. The final optimal model was obtained with first derivative using Savitzky–Golay smoothing (9 points window, second-order polynomial) and partial least squares (PLS) regression with leave-one-block-out cross validation. The correlation coefficient and Root Mean Square Error of prediction set is 0.98 and 0.43 g/L, respectively, which show the possibility of NIR as a rapid method for microanalysis and to be a promising tool for a rapid assay in HA fermentation.

Near infrared spectroscopy (NIRS) is based on molecular overtone and combination vibrations. It is difficult to assign specific features under complicated system. So it is necessary to find the relevance between NIRS and target compound. For this purpose, the chondroitin sulfate (CS) ethanol precipitation process was selected as the research model, and 90 samples of 5 different batches were collected and the content of CS was determined by modified carbazole method. The relevance between NIRS and CS was studied throughout optical pathlength, pretreatment methods and variables selection methods. In conclusion, the first derivative with Savitzky–Golay (SG) smoothing was selected as the best pretreatment, and the best spectral region was selected using interval partial least squares (iPLS) method under 1 mm optical cell. A multivariate calibration model was established using PLS algorithm for determining the content of CS, and the root mean square error of prediction (RMSEP) is 3.934 g⋅L-1. This method will have great potential in process analytical technology in the future.

Chondroitin sulfate (CS) plays important roles in the complement system. However, the CS structure is complicated due to different sources and the number and positions of sulfate groups. The objective of this study was to prepare different low molecular weight chondroitin sulfates (LMWCSs) and to investigate the biological activity in anti-complement capacity. A series of LMWCSs was prepared from different sources and characterized by ultraviolet-visible (UV) spectroscopy, high-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC), size exclusion chromatography-multiangle laser light scattering (SEC-MALLS) and nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy. Hemolytic, anti-complement 3 deposition capacity and cell viability assays were carried out to investigate the biological activities in vitro. The results showed that LMWCS prepared from shark cartilage with the oxidative degradation method (LMWCS-S-O) had the best anti-complement capacity. LMWCS-S-O could inhibit the alternative pathway of the complement system and protect chondrocytes from cell death. The attenuating effect of LMWCS-S-O on Osteoarthritis (OA) was investigated by destabilization of the medial meniscus (DMM) model in vivo. Functional wind-up, histological and C5b-9 analyses were used to evaluate the treatment effect on the OA model. In vivo results showed that LMWCS-S-O could attenuate OA. LMWCS-S-O with a high content of ΔDi-2,6diS and ΔDi-6S could be used for attenuating OA through regulating the complement system.