A network-based bioinformatic analysis for identifying potential repurposable active molecules in different types of human cancers

Drug repurposing, also known as drug repositioning, is the process of identifying novel therapeutic indications for existing drugs, offering a cost-effective and time-efficient strategy to drug discovery. In this context, we developed a network-based algorithm, named SAveRUNNER (Searching off-lAbel dRUg aNd NEtwoRk), which predicts drug-disease associations by accounting for the interaction between the drug targets and disease-associated genes in the human interactome, implementing a novel network-based similarity measure that prioritizes associations between drugs and diseases locating in the same network neighborhoods. Following its successful applications to different disorders (such as viral infections and neurological diseases), in this study, we applied SAveRUNNER on a panel of 13 types of cancers using both disease-associated genes downloaded from widely-used databases and from gene expression data.