A new computational drug repurposing method using established disease–drug pair knowledge

Abstract

Abstract Motivation Drug repurposing is a potential alternative to the classical drug discovery pipeline. Repurposing involves finding novel indications for already approved drugs. In this work, we present a novel machine learning-based method for drug repurposing. This method explores the anti-similarity between drugs and a disease to uncover new uses for the drugs. More specifically, our proposed method takes into account three sources of information: (i) large-scale gene expression profiles corresponding to human cell lines treated with small molecules, (ii) gene expression profile of a human disease and (iii) the known relationship between Food and Drug Administration (FDA)-approved drugs and diseases. Using these data, our proposed method learns a similarity metric through a supervised machine learning-based algorithm such that a disease and its associated FDA-approved drugs have smaller distance than the other disease-drug pairs. Results We validated our framework by showing that the proposed method incorporating distance metric learning technique can retrieve FDA-approved drugs for their approved indications. Once validated, we used our approach to identify a few strong candidates for repurposing. Availability and implementation The R scripts are available on demand from the authors. Supplementary information Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.