Drug and disease similarity calculation platform for drug repositioning

Abstract

Drug repositioning, aiming to infer potential indications for drugs efficiently, has achieved remarkable results in reducing the cycle, cost and risk of drug Research and Development (R&D), and mining new uses of known drugs. Currently, many computational drug repositioning strategies have been proposed. The similarity calculation, as one of the key steps of drug repositioning, has an important impact on the accuracy of computational drug repositioning. However, the biological data used for the similarity calculation come from a wide range of sources with different formats, and similarity calculation methods are developed in different programming languages, thus the similarity calculation methods are varying. To facilitate the similarity calculation for drug repositioning, we developed a computational platform consisting of various datasets and similarity measures for drugs and diseases, and four programming languages (Java, R, Python and MATLAB) are supported by our platform. Users can use relevant data and methods directly according to their needs and customize similarity calculation methods. The platform is available at: http://bioinformatics.csu.edu.cn/artemis/.