A chemogenomic approach to drug discovery: focus on cardiovascular diseases

References to individual protein targets and bioactive small molecules associated with cardiovascular diseases can be found in multiple bibliographic sources. From mining these sources, a highly curated list of 214 cardiovascular targets was collected and organised using functional classification schemes for the main protein families of therapeutic relevance, namely, enzymes, G-protein-coupled receptors, ion channels, and nuclear receptors. This list was then used to interrogate annotated chemical libraries and extract a chemical space of 44 032 small molecules connected to 160 targets. Some of these bioactive ligands were also found to have affinity for an additional set of 421 proteins not linked originally to cardiovascular diseases, thus constituting a valuable indirect source to complete the cardiovascular target space and infer a potential off-cardiovascular target space.