Drug-pathway association prediction: from experimental results to computational models

Effective drugs are urgently needed to overcome human complex diseases. However, the research and development of novel drug would take long time and cost much money. Traditional drug discovery follows the rule of one drug-one target, while some studies have demonstrated that drugs generally perform their task by affecting related pathway rather than targeting single target. Thus, the new strategy of drug discovery, namely pathway-based drug discovery, have been proposed. Obviously, identifying associations between drugs and pathways plays a key role in the development of pathway-based drug discovery. Revealing the drug-pathway associations by experiment methods would take much time and cost. Therefore, some computational models were established to predict potential drug-pathway associations. In this review, we first introduced the background of drug and the concept of drug-pathway associations. Then, some publicly accessible databases and web servers about drug-pathway associations were listed. Next, we summarized some state-of-the-art computational methods in the past years for inferring drug-pathway associations and divided these methods into three classes, namely Bayesian spare factor-based, matrix decomposition-based and other machine learning methods. In addition, we introduced several evaluation strategies to estimate the predictive performance of various computational models. In the end, we discussed the advantages and limitations of existing computational methods and provided some suggestions about the future directions of the data collection and the calculation models development.