Drug Repurposing Using Heterogeneous Networks

Drug discovery is a resource consuming and having high attrition rates for the development of a new drug, most of the drugs don’t get pass the pre-clinical stage therefore there is a need to find and alternative purpose of existing drugs which will lead to a de-risked clinical trial. This approach is known as Drug Repurposing. There is a complex web structure between the entities resulting in the development of a new drug such as gene, drug, disease, protein and side-effects, A homogenous network will only consider relations in binary options among the entities but such complex structures require precise meaning of what relation is between the entities for which a heterogeneous network is able to model. The outcome by this will hereby significantly reduce the time and lower the attrition rates of finding new drug targets with high success possibility of passing the clinical trials.