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. 2013 Aug 15;29(16):2071-2.
doi: 10.1093/bioinformatics/btt345. Epub 2013 Jun 12.

PiHelper: an open source framework for drug-target and antibody-target data

Bülent Arman Aksoy  1 , Jianjiong Gao, Gideon Dresdner, Weiqing Wang, Alex Root, Xiaohong Jing, Ethan Cerami, Chris Sander
Affiliations

PiHelper: an open source framework for drug-target and antibody-target data

Bülent Arman Aksoy et al. Bioinformatics. .

Abstract

Motivation: The interaction between drugs and their targets, often proteins, and between antibodies and their targets, is important for planning and analyzing investigational and therapeutic interventions in many biological systems. Although drug-target and antibody-target datasets are available in separate databases, they are not publicly available in an integrated bioinformatics resource. As medical therapeutics, especially in cancer, increasingly uses targeted drugs and measures their effects on biomolecular profiles, there is an unmet need for a user-friendly toolset that allows researchers to comprehensively and conveniently access and query information about drugs, antibodies and their targets.

Summary: The PiHelper framework integrates human drug-target and antibody-target associations from publicly available resources to help meet the needs of researchers in systems pharmacology, perturbation biology and proteomics. PiHelper has utilities to (i) import drug- and antibody-target information; (ii) search the associations either programmatically or through a web user interface (UI); (iii) visualize the data interactively in a network; and (iv) export relationships for use in publications or other analysis tools.

Availability: PiHelper is a free software under the GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL) v3.0. Source code and documentation are at http://bit.ly/pihelper. We plan to coordinate contributions from the community by managing future releases.

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Figures

Fig. 1.
Fig. 1.
Sample target network visualization: results showing all drug and antibody associations of EGFR and ERBB2 genes. PiHelper web UI allows exporting the network to various formats, e.g. SVG and Simple Interaction Formats
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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