Semantic Web Ontology and Data Integration: a Case Study in Aiding Psychiatric Drug Repurposing

Despite ongoing progress towards treating mental illness, there remain significant difficulties in selecting probable candidate drugs from the existing database. We describe an ontology - oriented approach aims to represent the nexus between genes, drugs, phenotypes, symptoms, and diseases from multiple information sources. Along with this approach, we report a case study in which we attempted to explore the candidate drugs that effective for both bipolar disorder and epilepsy. We constructed an ontology that incorporates the knowledge between the two diseases and performed semantic reasoning task on the ontology. The reasoning results suggested 48 candidate drugs that hold promise for a further breakthrough. The evaluation was performed and demonstrated the validity of the proposed ontology. The overarching goal of this research is to build a framework of ontology - based data integration underpinning psychiatric drug repurposing. This approach prioritizes the candidate drugs that have potential associations among genes, phenotypes and symptoms, and thus facilitates the data integration and drug repurposing in psychiatric disorders.