A Network-Based Approach for Identifying Effective Drug Combination

A Network-Based Approach for Identifying Effective Drug Combination

A Network-Based Approach for Identifying Effective Drug Combination

Author(s): Zikai Wu, Luonan Chen

Abstract:

To cope with complex diseases, combination regimens or combination drugs are increasingly attracting attention from the area of drug design. However, most of the combination drugs are developed based on clinical experience or by test-and-trial strategy. In this paper, we present a novel network-based systems biology approach to identify effective drug combinations by exploiting high throughput data. As a pilot study, we apply the proposed method to identify a combination of drugs used to treat Type 2 Diabetes. The results on real biological data demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed method.

Keywords:

Drug combination; molecular interaction network; active subnetwork; gene expression

Introduction:

There is a long history of using combination drugs for treating diseases and reducing suffering. Now, combination drug is becoming the standard of care for many complex diseases. As a result, some methods have been proposed to identify effective drug combinations. These methods can be grouped into two classes, i.e. computation (or in silico) based methods and experiment (or in vivo) based methods.

Source: The 3rd International Symposium on Optimization and Systems Biology

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