Authors: Hao Ye LinLin Yang ZhiWei Cao KaiLin Tang YiXue Li
Publish Date: 2012/02/22
Volume: 57, Issue: 17, Pages: 2106-2112
Abstract
Finding new applications for existing pharmaceuticals known as drug repositioning is a validated strategy for resolving the problem of high expenditure but low productivity in drug discovery Currently the prevalent computational methods for drug repositioning are focused mainly on the similarity or relevance between known drugs based on their “features” including chemical structure side effects gene expression profile and/or chemicalprotein interactome However such drugoriented methods may constrain the newly predicted functions to the pharmacological functional space of the existing drugs Clinically many drugs have been found to bind “offtarget” ie to receptors other than their primary targets which can lead to undesirable effects In this study which integrates known drug target information we propose a diseaseoriented strategy for evaluating the relationship between drugs and disease based on their pathway profile The basic hypothesis of this method is that drugs exerting a therapeutic effect may not only directly target the diseaserelated proteins but also modulate the pathways involved in the pathological process Upon testing eight of the global bestselling drugs in 2010 each with more than three targets the FDA Food and Drug Administration USAapproved therapeutic function of each was included in the top 10 predicted indications On average 60 of predicted results made using our method are proved by literature This approach could be used to complement existing methods and may provide a new perspective in drug repositioning and side effect evaluationThis article is published under an open access license Please check the Copyright Information section for details of this license and what reuse is permitted If your intended use exceeds what is permitted by the license or if you are unable to locate the licence and reuse information please contact the Rights and Permissions team
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