Drug Repurposing for Alzheimer’s Disease Based on Protein-Protein Interaction Network

Abstract

Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is known as a critical neurodegenerative disorder. It worsens as symptoms concerning dementia grow severe over the years. Due to the globalization of Alzheimer’s disease, its prevention and treatment are vital. This study proposes a method to extract substantial gene complexes and then introduces potential drugs in Alzheimer’s disease. To this end, a protein-protein interaction (PPI) network was utilized to extract five meaningful gene complexes functionally interconnected. An enrichment analysis to introduce the most important biological processes and pathways was accomplished on the obtained genes. The next step is extracting the drugs related to AD and introducing some new drugs which may be helpful for this disease. Finally, a complete network including all the genes associated with each gene complex group and genes’ target drug was illustrated. For validating the proposed potential drugs, Connectivity Map (CMAP) analysis was accomplished to determine target genes that are up- or downregulated by proposed drugs. Medical studies and publications were analyzed thoroughly to introduce AD-related drugs. This analysis proves the accuracy of the proposed method in this study. Then, new drugs were introduced that can be experimentally examined as future work. Raloxifene and gentian violet are two new drugs, which have not been introduced as AD-related drugs in previous scientific and medical studies, recommended by the method of this study. Besides the primary goal, five bipartite networks representing the genes of each group and their target miRNAs were constructed to introduce target miRNAs.