An Integrative Approach for Discovery of New Uses of Existing Drugs
Jiao Li, Zhiyong Lu · Data Science Journal · 2015
The discovery of new uses of existing drugs offers the possibility to reduce time and risk because the approved drugs have passed several phases along the drug development pipeline. In this study, we present a computational method for novel drug use prediction based on the idea that similar drugs are indicated for similar diseases. When computing drug pairwise similarities, we considered both chemical structure and drug target similarities. In validation, our new drug use predictions were found to be significantly enriched in both the biomedical literature and clinical trials. These results indicate that our method is able to successfully integrate both biomedical scientific data and literature for drug discovery.