Machine learning identifies candidates for drug repurposing in Alzheimer's disease
Steve Rodriguez, Clemens Hug, Petar Todorov, Nienke Moret, Sarah A Boswell, Kyle Evans, George Zhou, Nathan T Johnson, Bradley T Hyman, Peter K Sorger, Mark W Albers, Artem Sokolov, Steve Rodriguez, Clemens Hug, Petar Todorov, Nienke Moret, Sarah A Boswell, Kyle Evans, George Zhou, Nathan T Johnson, Bradley T Hyman, Peter K Sorger, Mark W Albers, Artem Sokolov
Abstract
Clinical trials of novel therapeutics for Alzheimer's Disease (AD) have consumed a large amount of time and resources with largely negative results. Repurposing drugs already approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for another indication is a more rapid and less expensive option. We present DRIAD (Drug Repurposing In AD), a machine learning framework that quantifies potential associations between the pathology of AD severity (the Braak stage) and molecular mechanisms as encoded in lists of gene names. DRIAD is applied to lists of genes arising from perturbations in differentiated human neural cell cultures by 80 FDA-approved and clinically tested drugs, producing a ranked list of possible repurposing candidates. Top-scoring drugs are inspected for common trends among their targets. We propose that the DRIAD method can be used to nominate drugs that, after additional validation and identification of relevant pharmacodynamic biomarker(s), could be readily evaluated in a clinical trial.
Conflict of interest statement
The authors declare the following competing interests. P.K.S. is a member of the SAB or Board of Directors of Applied Biomath, RareCyte, NanoString and Glencoe Software and has equity in some of these companies. In the last 5 years, the Sorger lab has received research funding from Novartis and Merck. P.K.S. declares that none of these relationships are directly or indirectly related to the content of this manuscript. B.T.H. has stock in Novartis and Dewpoint. N.T.J. is an employee of H3 Biomedicine, a subsidiary of Eisai Inc. that develops therapies for Alzheimer’s. S.R., P.K.S., M.W.A., and A.S. are inventors on a patent application (WO/2017/173451) for novel targets in neurodegenerative diseases. All other authors (C.H., P.T., N.M., S.B., K.E., G.Z.) declare no competing interests.
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