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A Knowledge Graph Approach to Elucidate the Role of Organellar Pathways in Disease via Biomedical Reports
Published on: October 13, 2023
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The Alzheimer's Knowledge Base: A Knowledge Graph for Alzheimer Disease Research.
Joseph D Romano1,2,3, Van Truong1,4,5, Rachit Kumar1,4,5,6
1Institute for Biomedical Informatics, Perelman School of Medicine, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, United States.
Journal of Medical Internet Research
|April 18, 2024
Summary
A new Alzheimer's Knowledge Base (AlzKB) aids drug discovery by integrating diverse data. It identifies novel therapeutic targets and repurposes drugs, offering a valuable tool for neurodegenerative disease research.
Area of Science:
- Neuroscience
- Pharmacology
- Bioinformatics
Background:
- Aging global populations increase susceptibility to neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer's disease (AD).
- Existing data resources lack comprehensive relationships for AD etiology and drug response.
- Urgent need for novel therapies and improved drug discovery/repurposing tools for AD.
Purpose of the Study:
- To develop the Alzheimer's Knowledge Base (AlzKB) for comprehensive knowledge representation of AD.
- To capture AD etiology and candidate therapeutics for improved drug discovery.
- To provide a public, accessible resource for AD research.
Main Methods:
- Constructed AlzKB as a large, heterogeneous graph knowledge base.
- Integrated 22 diverse external data sources (chemicals, genes, anatomy, diseases).
- Utilized Web Ontology Language 2 for semantic consistency and ontological inference.
Main Results:
- AlzKB contains 118,902 entities and 1,309,527 relationships.
- Applied graph data science and machine learning to propose new therapeutic targets.
- Successfully repurposed existing drugs and identified novel therapeutic associations for AD.
Conclusions:
- AlzKB is a novel, publicly available knowledge resource for AD drug discovery.
- Enables discovery of complex translational associations.
- Demonstrates value in proposing novel therapeutic hypotheses from public biomedical knowledge.
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