Drug-therapy networks and the prediction of novel drug targets

Abstract

A recent study in BMC Pharmacology presents a network of drugs and the therapies in which they are used. Network approaches open new ways of predicting novel drug targets and overcoming the cellular robustness that can prevent drugs from working.

Figure 1

Overview and possible extensions of therapy, disease, drug and drug-target networks. The ovals represent data types (datasets) that have already been used for network construction (connected with white arrows) or that could be used to construct similar networks in the future (connected with black arrows). Datasets are positioned from top to bottom in the approximate order of their decreasing complexity; datasets in the same row overlap each other. Numbers indicate: (1) the drug-therapy network of Nacher and Schwartz [8]; (2) drug-target networks [1,6,7,9]; (3) a disease-gene network [15].