Drug repurposing for Parkinson’s disease by pathway-weighted network proximity analysis

Abstract

The research suggests new network construction method when using proximity-based drug repurposing. The interactions between genes that are found in multiple biological pathways and Parkinson’s disease related pathways have more significance than other interactions and the significance is reflected to the network edge weights. Using the pathway-weighted network, the significant difference of the proximity between known and unknown Parkinson’s disease is found. Drug-disease interaction inference using the method shows higher performance than the method using conventional network. The path between the drug and disease corresponds to the drug’s mechanism of action and the unknown Parkinson’s disease drugs with high proximity in the pathway-weighted network have potential of the Parkinson’s disease treatment. In summary, the research suggests the proximity-based drug repurposing method using the pathway-weighted network. It has accurate drug-disease interaction inference and suggests reliable Parkinson’s disease drug repurposing targets.