Drug repositioning using disease associated biological processes and network analysis of drug targets

The analysis of disease using protein-protein interaction networks and network pharmacology has enabled better understanding of disease etiology and drug action. New insights into disease etiology and a better understanding of biological subsystems have opened up the possibility of finding new uses for existing drugs besides their original medical indication. We present an approach which makes use of the biological processes associated with diseases along with their known drugs and drug targets to predict Biological Process-Drug relationships. Network analysis is used to further refine these associations to eventually predict new Disease-Drug relationships. The approach is validated by the observation that, out of 2078 predicted disease-drug relationships, 401 (18.1%) have been used in a clinical trial.