Drug repurposing using GraphLab

Recently I learned about an interesting work by Murat Can Cobangolu, a graduate student at the CMU-Pitt computational biology institution who is using GraphLab for predicting drug target interaction.
The basic idea is that a new medication creation is a complicated and costly process. The idea is that we can use drugs that are already safe to use for other purposes relative to the ones they were designed. For example, Viagra was design to be heart medication and eventually ended up as a stimulator..

The work is reported in the following paper: 

• MC Cobanoglu et al., (2013) "Predicting Drug-Target Interactions Using Probabilistic Matrix Factorization." Journal of Chemical Information and Modeling, vol. 53, pp. 3399–3409. http://pubs.acs.org/doi/ipdf/10.1021/ci400219z

The construction is rather simple. A matrix of drugs vs. their gene interaction is construction and a matrix factorization methods is built to build a model. Using the model one can predict the interaction of any drug with any gene.

If you like to learn more about this work, and GraphLab applications to Health Care, you are invited to attend our 3rd GraphLab Conference. We have invited Murat to present his work there.