What is it about?
Drugs typically function through interactions with proteins. Since proteins also interact amongst themselves the drug target does not always have to be one of the proteins known to be involved in a disease. It can also target a protein that then targets the disease process. We made the protein interactions that are described in biological pathways on WikiPathways accessible in a machine-readable way. That can facilitate new drug discovery, new ideas about drug combinations and repurposing of drugs originally developed for another disease.
Featured Image
Why is it important?
In this big data era, it is not only important to be able to explore interactions in biological pathways, given the amount of available data we want to explore such interactions automatically, which is why machine readable approaches are important.
Perspectives
We previously combined information on drug targets (from databases like ChEMBL), the information about the targets themselves (from UniProt), the function of these drug targets in biological pathways (from WikiPathways and Reactome) and the known involvement of protein-coding genes in diseases (from DisGeNET) in one resource in the Open PHACTS project. We now improve the interaction information from the pathways, which makes it possible to walk from a gene involved in a disease to a possible drug target interacting with the gene product.
Professor Chris Evelo
Maastricht University
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Explicit interaction information from WikiPathways in RDF facilitates drug discovery in the Open PHACTS Discovery Platform, F1000Research, January 2018, Faculty of 1000, Ltd.,
DOI: 10.12688/f1000research.13197.1.
You can read the full text:
Contributors
The following have contributed to this page
