Dataset Information

Pathway-based drug repositioning using causal inference.

ABSTRACT:

Background

Recent in vivo studies showed new hopes of drug repositioning through causality inference from drugs to disease. Inspired by their success, here we present an in silico method for building a causal network (CauseNet) between drugs and diseases, in an attempt to systematically identify new therapeutic uses of existing drugs.

Methods

Unlike the traditional 'one drug-one target-one disease' causal model, we simultaneously consider all possible causal chains connecting drugs to diseases via target- and gene-involved pathways based on rich information in several expert-curated knowledge-bases. With statistical learning, our method estimates transition likelihood of each causal chain in the network based on known drug-disease treatment associations (e.g. bexarotene treats skin cancer).

Results

To demonstrate its validity, our method showed high performance (AUC = 0.859) in cross validation. Moreover, our top scored prediction results are highly enriched in literature and clinical trials. As a showcase of its utility, we show several drugs for potential re-use in Crohn's Disease.

Conclusions

We successfully developed a computational method for discovering new uses of existing drugs based on casual inference in a layered drug-target-pathway-gene- disease network. The results showed that our proposed method enables hypothesis generation from public accessible biological data for drug repositioning.

SUBMITTER: Li J

PROVIDER: S-EPMC3853312 | biostudies-literature | 2013

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Publications

Pathway-based drug repositioning using causal inference.

Li Jiao J Lu Zhiyong Z

BMC bioinformatics 20131022

<h4>Background</h4>Recent in vivo studies showed new hopes of drug repositioning through causality inference from drugs to disease. Inspired by their success, here we present an in silico method for building a causal network (CauseNet) between drugs and diseases, in an attempt to systematically identify new therapeutic uses of existing drugs.<h4>Methods</h4>Unlike the traditional 'one drug-one target-one disease' causal model, we simultaneously consider all possible causal chains connecting drug ...[more]

PMID: 24564553

Similar Datasets

Project description:BackgroundDiverse interactions occur between biomolecules, such as activation, inhibition, expression, or repression. However, previous network-based studies of drug repositioning have employed interaction on the binary protein-protein interaction (PPI) network without considering the characteristics of the interactions. Recently, some studies of drug repositioning using gene expression data found that associations between drug and disease genes are useful information for identifying novel drugs to treat diseases. However, the gene expression profiles for drugs and diseases are not always available. Although gene expression profiles of drugs and diseases are available, existing methods cannot use the drugs or diseases, when differentially expressed genes in the profiles are not included in their network.ResultsWe developed a novel method for identifying candidate indications of existing drugs considering types of interactions between biomolecules based on known drug-disease associations. To obtain associations between drug and disease genes, we constructed a directed network using protein interaction and gene regulation data obtained from various public databases providing diverse biological pathways. The network includes three types of edges depending on relationships between biomolecules. To quantify the association between a target gene and a disease gene, we explored the shortest paths from the target gene to the disease gene and calculated the types and weights of the shortest paths. For each drug-disease pair, we built a vector consisting of values for each disease gene influenced by the drug. Using the vectors and known drug-disease associations, we constructed classifiers to identify novel drugs for each disease.ConclusionWe propose a method for exploring candidate drugs of diseases using associations between drugs and disease genes derived from a directed gene network instead of gene regulation data obtained from gene expression profiles. Compared to existing methods that require information on gene relationships and gene expression data, our method can be applied to a greater number of drugs and diseases. Furthermore, to validate our predictions, we compared the predictions with drug-disease pairs in clinical trials using the hypergeometric test, which showed significant results. Our method also showed better performance compared to existing methods for the area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC).

Dataset Information

Pathway-based drug repositioning using causal inference.

Background

Methods

Results

Conclusions

Publications

Pathway-based drug repositioning using causal inference.

Similar Datasets

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