Human symptoms–disease network

Abstract

In the post-genomic era, the elucidation of the relationship between the molecular origins of diseases and their resulting phenotypes is a crucial task for medical research. Here, we use a large-scale biomedical literature database to construct a symptom-based human disease network and investigate the connection between clinical manifestations of diseases and their underlying molecular interactions. We find that the symptom-based similarity of two diseases correlates strongly with the number of shared genetic associations and the extent to which their associated proteins interact. Moreover, the diversity of the clinical manifestations of a disease can be related to the connectivity patterns of the underlying protein interaction network. The comprehensive, high-quality map of disease-symptom relations can further be used as a resource helping to address important questions in the field of systems medicine, for example, the identification of unexpected associations between diseases, disease etiology research or drug design.

Transcription Factor NRF2 as a Therapeutic Target for Chronic Diseases: A Systems Medicine Approach

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Integrative methods for analyzing big data in precision medicine

“…The first group of methods uses some notion of similarity between drugs (e.g., chemical similarity [149], similarity between gene expressions induced by drug actions [74], or drug-side effect similarity [150]) to group drugs and infer a novel drug candidate for repurposing from the group that can perform the same action as other drugs in the group. The second group of methods uses similarities between diseases (e.g., phenotype similarity [151], or similarity between disease symptoms [152]) to group diseases and to infer a novel drug for repurposing by expanding known associations between the drug and some members of the group to the rest of the group. Other approaches use target-based similarities [153], i.e., protein sequence similarity [154], or 3D structural similarity [155], to infer novel drugs.…”

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