Literature-based drug–drug similarity for drug repurposing: impact of Medical Subject Headings term refinement and hierarchical clustering

Abstract

Background: We describe herein, an improved procedure for drug repurposing based on refined Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) terms and hierarchical clustering method. Materials & methods: In the present study, we have employed MeSH data from MEDLINE (2019), 1669 US FDA approved drugs from Open FDA and a refined set of MeSH terms. Refinement of MeSH terms was performed to include terms related to mechanistic information of drugs and diseases. Results and Conclusions: In-depth analysis of the results obtained, demonstrated greater efficiency of the proposed approach, based on refined MeSH terms and hierarchical clustering, in terms of number of selected drug candidates for repurposing. Further, analysis of misclustering and size of noise clusters suggest that the proposed approach is reliable and can be employed in drug repurposing.