Protein Structure Network-based Drug Design

Although structure-based drug design (SBDD) has become an indispensable tool in drug discovery for a long time, it continues to pose major challenges to date. With the advancement of "omics" techniques, systems biology has enriched SBDD into a new era, called polypharmacology, in which multi-targets drug or drug combination is designed to fight complex diseases. As a preliminary tool in systems biology, protein structure networks (PSNs) treat a protein as a set of residues linked by edges corresponding to the intramolecular interactions existing in folded structures between the residues. The PSN offers a computationally efficient tool to study the structure and function of proteins, and thus may facilitate structurebased drug design. Herein, we provide an overview of recent advances in PSNs, from predicting functionally important residues, to charactering protein-protein interactions and allosteric communication paths. Furthermore, we discuss potential pharmacological applications of PSN concepts and tools, and highlight the application to two families of drug targets, GPCRs and Hsp90. Although the application of PSNs as a framework for computer-aided drug discovery has been limited to date, we put forward the potential utility value in the near future and propose the PSNs could also serve as a new tool for polypharmacology research.