W Jim Zheng
Posters-Accepted Abstracts: Biol Syst Open Access
Combination therapy is a strategy that combines multiple drugs to improve therapeutic efficacy against a single disease. It is an essential component of standard-of-care treatments for many devastating diseases. However, while success stories such as cocktail therapy for HIV dramatically improved outcomes, there is no effective way to systematically identify promising drug combinations. By combining literature mining, ontology and systems biology, we recently developed an Ontology Fingerprint derived gene network. In this work, we employed the ontology fingerprint derived gene network to identify novel combination therapy strategy to treat cancer. By analyzing the sub-network structure of important cancer pathways in this gene network, we identified novel genes predicted to work with these pathways. Based on our work in the model organism Saccharomyces cerevisiae, we predicted that these genes could be targeted to improve the efficacy of the drugs targeting the corresponding cancer pathways. The predicted gene-drug combinations are currently under testing by using siRNA-screening methods to evaluate the synergistic effects between siRNA and the drug combinations. Our novel approach provided a systematic way to identify drug combination strategy to treat human diseases.
