Network medicine in drug design: implications for neuroinflammation

Neuroinflammation is a general innate defensive response to neurotropic pathogens, neurodegenerative diseases or brain injuries, brought about by active proinflammatory signaling by the glial cells (microglia and astrocytes). Because these inflammatory signaling pathways cross-talk with each other, drug targeting at any particular intermediate molecule is not effective. Network medicine is a network theory inspired approach in drug design, whereby various mathematical models are applied to identify plausible nodes within a signaling pathway simulated network important for drug targeting. There are many techniques involved in network medicine study; in this article we concentrate on the ‘prioritization of protein clusters’ responsible for a certain disorder. This approach aims to bring down the expenditure of resources of initial drug targeting against a complex pathological reaction, such as neuroinflammation, and also questions the cause at the molecular level.