There is no author summary for this article yet. Authors can add summaries to their articles on ScienceOpen to make them more accessible to a non-specialist audience.
Abstract
Drug repositioning is an innovative approach to identify new therapeutic indications
for existing drugs. Drug repositioning offers the promise of reducing drug development
timeframes and costs, and because it involves drugs that are already in the clinic,
it might remedy some of the drug safety challenges traditionally associated with drug
candidates that are not yet available in the clinic. The gene-by-drug interactions
are an important dimension of optimal drug repositioning and development strategies.
While gene-by-drug interactions have been curated and presented in various databases,
novel bioinformatics tools and approaches are timely, and required with a specific
focus to support drug positioning. We report, in this study, the design of a public
web-accessible transcriptomic-/gene expression-guided pharmaceuticals search tool,
geneXpharma ( www.genexpharma.org ). GeneXpharma is a public platform with user-centric
interface that provides statistically evaluated gene expressions and their drug interactions
for 48 diseases under seven different disease categories. GeneXpharma is designed
and organized to generate hypotheses on druggable genome within the disease-gene-drug
triad and thus, help repositioning of drugs against diseases. The search system accommodates
various entry points using drugs, genes, or diseases, which then enable researchers
to extract drug repurposing candidates and readily export for further evaluation.
Future developments aim to improve the geneXpharma algorithm, enrich its content,
and enhance the website interface through addition of network visualizations and graphical
display items. Bioinformatics search tools can help enable the convergence of drug
repositioning and gene-by-drug interactions so as to further optimize drug development
efforts in the future.