Drug repurposing opportunities across 92 CNS-related conditions using deep learning and whole-genome sequencing

Yichuan Liu1, Hui-Qi Qu1, Frank D Mentch1

  • 1Center for Applied Genomics, Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, Philadelphia, PA, 19104, USA.

Insights

This study developed a novel method to identify existing drugs for repurposing in central nervous system (CNS) disorders by integrating drug pathways with genetic data, accelerating therapeutic development for complex brain conditions.

Area of Science:

  • Neuroscience
  • Pharmacology
  • Genomics

Background:

  • Central nervous system (CNS) disorders face therapeutic development challenges including blood-brain barrier issues and biological complexity.
  • Drug repurposing offers a faster route but needs effective, mechanism-based prioritization strategies.

Purpose of the Study:

  • To create a scalable, genetically informed approach for prioritizing drug repurposing candidates for CNS disorders.
  • To link approved or clinical-stage drugs to CNS diagnoses using pathway analysis and whole-genome sequencing (WGS) data.

Main Methods:

  • Curated 213 drugs with KEGG pathway signatures and integrated them with WGS pathway-importance profiles from 4392 individuals across 92 diagnoses.
  • Developed a Repurposing Score based on drug maturity, pathway overlap, and WGS genetic support, excluding on-label and infection indications.
  • Assessed evidence using publication and ClinicalTrials.gov screening, identifying high-confidence drug-diagnosis pairs.

Main Results:

  • Generated 12,040 unique drug-diagnosis repurposing pairs, with 25.4% supported by multiple genetic variant classes.
  • Identified 1430 high-confidence drug-diagnosis pairs after stratification, highlighting key mechanisms like RTK-MAPK/PI3K and immune signaling.
  • Demonstrated the utility of variant-class-resolved WGS pathway prioritization for scalable, genetically supported drug repurposing.

Conclusions:

  • This integrated approach enables efficient identification of existing drugs for CNS disorder repurposing.
  • The method provides genetically supported hypotheses for biomarker-guided clinical validation.
  • Facilitates the recovery of clinically explored strategies and generation of novel therapeutic avenues for brain conditions.