Predicting effective drug combinations via network propagation
Balázs Ligeti, Roberto Vera Alvarez, Gergely Lukacs, Balázs Győrffy, Sándor Pongor · 2013
Drug combinations are frequently used in treating complex diseases including cancer, diabetes, arthritis and hypertension. Most drug combinations were found in empirical ways so there is a need of efficient computational methods. Here we present a novel method based on network analysis which estimates the efficacy of drug combinations from a perturbation analysis performed on a protein-protein association network. The results suggest that those drugs are likely to form effective combinations that perturb a large number of proteins in common, even if the original targets are found in seemingly unrelated pathways.