Zeitschrift für Proteomik und Bioinformatik
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Drug Repurposing For Treatment of Alzheimer’s Disease Using Gene Co-Expression Networks

Shila Amini*

Alzheimer’s Disease (AD) has attracted the attention of many developed countries due to the increasing population of the elderly. Global statistics show that more people will be afflicted in the coming years. Due to the lack of definitive treatment for AD, this study aimed to discover and repurpose drugs to treat AD with an approach based on gene co-expression networks. In this study, genes related to AD were collected from recently published genetic articles and databases. Then, the gene co-expression network was reconstructed for the collected genes. Next, gene modules with similar expression levels were extracted using clustering algorithms and reported as important gene modules in AD. Also, to investigate the effects of genes obtained for microRNAs, the list of microRNAs that target the module genes was retrieved, and the miRNA-Mrna bipartite networks were reconstructed separately for the gene modules. After reconstructing the bipartite miRNA-mRNA networks, we checked the drug databases and identified genes targeting the modules. After identifying the drugs and their gene targets, we reconstructed the drug-gene networks for each module separately. Finally, some drugs that target more genes were selected, studied, and evaluated. The most important drugs were suggested as candidate drugs for treatment of AD.