Title
gene2drug: a Computational Tool for Pathway-based Rational Drug Repositioning.
Abstract
Motivation: Drug repositioning has been proposed as an effective shortcut to drug discovery. The availability of large collections of transcriptional responses to drugs enables computational approaches to drug repositioning directly based on measured molecular effects. Results: We introduce a novel computational methodology for rational drug repositioning, which exploits the transcriptional responses following treatment with small molecule. Specifically, given a therapeutic target gene, a prioritization of potential effective drugs is obtained by assessing their impact on the transcription of genes in the pathway(s) including the target. We performed in silico validation and comparison with a state-of-art technique based on similar principles. We next performed experimental validation in two different real-case drug repositioning scenarios: (i) upregulation of the glutamate-pyruvate transaminase (GPT), which has been shown to induce reduction of oxalate levels in a mouse model of primary hyperoxaluria, and (ii) activation of the transcription factor TFEB, a master regulator of lysosomal biogenesis and autophagy, whose modulation may be beneficial in neurodegenerative disorders.
Year
DOI
Venue
2018
10.1093/bioinformatics/btx800
BIOINFORMATICS
Field
DocType
Volume
Regulator,Downregulation and upregulation,Drug repositioning,Drug discovery,TFEB,Biology,Small molecule,Bioinformatics,Transcription factor,In silico
Journal
34
Issue
ISSN
Citations 
9
1367-4803
0
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.34
9
8