Pathway-based drug repositioning using causal inference

BACKGROUND: Recent in vivo studies showed new hopes of drug repositioning through causality inference from drugs to disease. Inspired by their success, here we present an in silico method for building a causal network (CauseNet) between drugs and diseases, in an attempt to systematically identify new therapeutic uses of existing drugs. METHODS: Unlike the traditional 'one drug-one target-one disease' causal model, we simultaneously consider all possible causal chains connecting drugs to diseases via target- and gene-involved pathways based on rich information in several expert-curated knowledge-bases. With statistical learning, our method estimates transition likelihood of each causal chain in the network based on known drug-disease treatment associations (e.g. bexarotene treats skin cancer). RESULTS: To demonstrate its validity, our method showed high performance (AUC = 0.859) in cross validation. Moreover, our top scored prediction results are highly enriched in literature and clinical trials. As a showcase of its utility, we show several drugs for potential re-use in Crohn's Disease. CONCLUSIONS: We successfully developed a computational method for discovering new uses of existing drugs based on casual inference in a layered drug-target-pathway-gene- disease network. The results showed that our proposed method enables hypothesis generation from public accessible biological data for drug repositioning.