Abstract
A drug’s biological half-life is defined as the time required for the human body to metabolize or eliminate 50% of the initial drug dosage. Correctly measuring the half-life of a given drug is helpful for the safe and accurate usage of the drug. In this study, we investigated which gene ontology (GO) terms and biological pathways were highly related to the determination of drug half-life. The investigated drugs, with known half-lives, were analyzed based on their enrichment scores for associated GO terms and KEGG pathways. These scores indicate which GO terms or KEGG pathways the drug targets. The feature selection method, minimum redundancy maximum relevance, was used to analyze these GO terms and KEGG pathways and to identify important GO terms and pathways, such as sodium-independent organic anion transmembrane transporter activity (GO:0015347), monoamine transmembrane transporter activity (GO:0008504), negative regulation of synaptic transmission (GO:0050805), neuroactive ligand-receptor interaction (hsa04080), serotonergic synapse (hsa04726), and linoleic acid metabolism (hsa00591), among others. This analysis confirmed our results and may show evidence for a new method in studying drug half-lives and building effective computational methods for the prediction of drug half-lives.
Highlights
A drug is any substance that contributes to the relief of various pathological symptoms, which usually induces a pharmacological change in the human body [1,2,3]
A pharmaceutical drug or medicine is defined as the functional component that is extracted from biological material or synthesized by the modern pharmaceutical synthesis industry [4]
The drug biological half-life has been defined as the time required for the human body to metabolize or eliminate 50% of the initial value of the functional drug dosage [10]
Summary
A drug is any substance that contributes to the relief of various pathological symptoms, which usually induces a pharmacological change in the human body [1,2,3]. A pharmaceutical drug or medicine is defined as the functional component that is extracted from biological material or synthesized by the modern pharmaceutical synthesis industry [4]. Drugs, such as antibiotics, have been regarded as the most effective weapons for preventing various diseases in humans and maintaining health. The drug biological half-life (usually abbreviated half-life) has been defined as the time required for the human body to metabolize or eliminate 50% of the initial value of the functional drug dosage [10]. Considering that the real half-life of a specific drug is difficult to detect and measure in most situations (except for drugs with a high tissue residual ratio such as Digitoxin), we take the plasma half-life of drugs as the reference value [13, 14]
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