GenCoNet – A Graph Database for the Analysis of Comorbidities by Gene Networks

The prevalence of comorbid diseases poses a major health issue for millions of people worldwide and an enormous socio-economic burden for society. The molecular mechanisms for the development of comorbidities need to be investigated. For this purpose, a workflow system was developed to aggregate data on biomedical entities from heterogeneous data sources. The process of integrating and merging all data sources of the workflow system was implemented as a semi-automatic pipeline that provides the import, fusion, and analysis of the highly connected biomedical data in a Neo4j database GenCoNet. As a starting point, data on the common comorbid diseases essential hypertension and bronchial asthma was integrated. GenCoNet (https://genconet.kalis-amts.de) is a curated database that provides a better understanding of hereditary bases of comorbidities.