Analysis and identification of drug similarity through drug side effects and indications data

The measurement of drug similarity has many potential applications for assessing drug therapy similarity, patient similarity, and the success of treatment modalities. To date, a family of computational methods has been employed to predict drug-drug similarity. Here, we announce a computational method for measuring drug-drug similarity based on drug indications and side effects.

The model was applied for 2997 drugs in the side effects category and 1437 drugs in the indications category. The corresponding binary vectors were built to determine the Drug-drug similarity for each drug. Various similarity measures were conducted to discover drug-drug similarity.

Among the examined similarity methods, the Jaccard similarity measure was the best in overall performance results. In total, 5,521,272 potential drug pair's similarities were studied in this research. The offered model was able to predict 3,948,378 potential similarities.

Based on these results, we propose the current method as a robust, simple, and quick approach to identifying drug similarity.