RESKO: Repositioning drugs by using side effects and knowledge from ontologies

The objective of drug repositioning is to apply existing drugs to different diseases or medical conditions than the original target, and thus alleviate to a certain extent the time and cost expended in drug development. Our system RESKO, REpositioning drugs using Side Effects and Knowledge from Ontologies, identifies drugs with similar side-effects which are potential candidates for use elsewhere, the supposition is that similar side-effects may be caused by drugs targeting similar proteins and pathways. RESKO, integrates drug chemical data, protein interaction and ontological knowledge. The novel aspects of our system include a high level of biological knowledge through the use of pathway and biological ontology integration. This provides a explanation facility lacking in most of the existing methods and improves the repositioning process. We evaluate the shared side effects from the eight conventional Alzheimer drugs, from which sixty-seven candidate drugs based on a side-effect commonality were identified. The top 25 drugs on the list were further investigated in depth for their suitability to be repositioned, the literature revealed that many of the candidate drugs appear to have been trialed for Alzheimer's disease. Thus verifying the accuracy of our system, we also compare our technique with several competing systems found in the literature.