Protein localization vector propagation: a method for improving the accuracy of drug repositioning

Identifying alternative indications for known drugs is important for the pharmaceutical industry. Many computational methods have been proposed for predicting unknown associations between drugs and target proteins associated with diseases. To produce better prediction, researchers should not only develop accurate algorithms but identify good features that reflect intracellular systems. In this paper, we proposed a novel method for exploiting protein localization. We generated localization vectors (LVs) from protein localization and propagated LVs through a protein interaction network to increase the coverage of the localization information. The LVs showed distinct patterns among targets of known drugs as well as independent characteristics compared to existing features. Based on the experimental results, we determined that including LVs improves cross-validation accuracy and, produces better novel predictions with real and independent clinical trial data. Moreover, the propagation of LVs showed a positive result that it can help in increasing the coverage of the prediction results.