Drugs with similar side-effects are potential candidates for use elsewhere, the supposition is that similar side-effects may be caused by drugs targeting similar proteins. DrugBank and SIDER4 are publicly-available resources of drug information and side-effects. It is our intention to repurpose drugs using these resources for various diseases.
The objective of drug repositioning is to apply existing drugs to different diseases or medical conditions than the original target, and thus alleviate to a certain extent the time and cost expended in drug development. The area of drug repositioning is a suitable application area for computational intelligence because numerous online databases containing technical information on drug targets, protein interactions, side-effects and biological knowledge are currently available.
Whilst no guarentees can be made as to the eventual repostioning success of any candidate drug generated by the computational techniques, it is a good first step in reducing the search space for potential drugs.
This work is described in our Knowledge Based Systems paper. Please cite it, if you find the source code and data useful.
Ken McGarry, Yitka Graham, Sharon McDonald and Anuam Rashid, RESKO: Repositioning drugs by using side effects and knowledge from ontologies, Knowledge Based Systems, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.knosys.2018.06.017 2018.
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