A Computational Drug Repositioning Method for Rare Diseases

  1. Belén Otero-Carrasco 1
  2. Lucía Prieto Santamaría 1
  3. Esther Ugarte Carro 1
  4. Juan Pedro Caraça-Valente Hernández 1
  5. Alejandro Rodríguez-González 1
  1. 1 Universidad Politécnica de Madrid
    info

    Universidad Politécnica de Madrid

    Madrid, España

    ROR https://ror.org/03n6nwv02

Book:
Bio-inspired Systems and Applications: from Robotics to Ambient Intelligence: 9th International Work-Conference on the Interplay Between Natural and Artificial Computation, IWINAC 2022, Puerto de la Cruz, Tenerife, Spain, May 31 – June 3, 2022, Proceedings, Part II
  1. José Manuel Ferrández Vicente (dir. congr.)
  2. José Ramón Alvarez Sánchez (dir. congr.)
  3. Félix de la Paz López (dir. congr.)
  4. Hojjat Adeli

Publisher: Springer Suiza

ISBN: 978-3-031-06527-9

Year of publication: 2022

Pages: 551-561

Type: Book chapter

Abstract

Rare diseases are a group of unusual pathologies in the world population, hence their name. They are considered the great neglected field of pharmaceutical research. To date, over 6,000 rare diseases have been identified and most of them lack treatment. The fact that they are so rare in the population does not encourage research efforts since their treatments are not in high demand. This work aims to analyze potential drug repositioning strategies that could be applied to these types of diseases. That is, discovering if existing drugs currently used for treating certain diseases can be employed to treat rare diseases. This process has been carried out using computational methods that compute similarities between rare diseases and other diseases, considering biological characteristics such as genes, proteins, and symptoms. The obtained potential drug repositioning hypotheses have been contrasted with related clinical trials found in scientific literature published to date.