CaNDis: a web server for investigation of causal relationships between diseases, drugs and drug targets

MOTIVATION: Causal biological interaction networks represent cellular regulatory pathways. Their fusion with other biological data enables insights into disease mechanisms and novel opportunities for drug discovery. RESULTS: We developed Causal Network of Diseases (CaNDis), a web server for the exploration of a human causal interaction network, which we expanded with data on diseases and FDA-approved drugs, on the basis of which we constructed a disease–disease network in which the links represent the similarity between diseases. We show how CaNDis can be used to identify candidate genes with known and novel roles in disease co-occurrence and drug–drug interactions. AVAILABILITYAND IMPLEMENTATION: CaNDis is freely available to academic users at http://candis.ijs.si and http://candis.insilab.org. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.