Drug repurposing against Parkinson's disease by text mining the scientific literature

Abstract

PurposeDrug repurposing involves the identification of new applications for existing drugs. Owing to the enormous rise in the costs of pharmaceutical R&D, several pharmaceutical companies are leveraging repurposing strategies. Parkinson's disease is the second most common neurodegenerative disorder worldwide, affecting approximately 1–2 percent of the human population older than 65 years. This study proposes a literature-based drug repurposing strategy in Parkinson's disease.Design/methodology/approachThe literature-based drug repurposing strategy proposed herein combined natural language processing, network science and machine learning methods for analyzing unstructured text data and producing actional knowledge for drug repurposing. The approach comprised multiple computational components, including the extraction of biomedical entities and their relationships, knowledge graph construction, knowledge representation learning and machine learning-based prediction.FindingsThe proposed strategy was used to mine information pertaining to the mechanisms of disease treatment from known treatment relationships and predict drugs for repurposing against Parkinson's disease. The F1 score of the best-performing method was 0.97, indicating the effectiveness of the proposed approach. The study also presents experimental results obtained by combining the different components of the strategy.Originality/valueThe drug repurposing strategy proposed herein for Parkinson's disease is distinct from those existing in the literature in that the drug repurposing pipeline includes components of natural language processing, knowledge representation and machine learning for analyzing the scientific literature. The results of the study provide important and valuable information to researchers studying different aspects of Parkinson's disease.