Drug Repurposing for Parkinson's Disease Using Random Walk With Restart Algorithm and the Parkinson's Disease Ontology Database

Abstract

Parkinson's disease is a progressive and slowly developing neurodegenerative disease, characterized by dopaminergic neuron loss in the substantia nigra region of the brain. Despite extensive research by scientists, there is not yet a cure to this problem and the available therapies mainly help to reduce some of the Parkinson's symptoms. Drug repurposing (that is, the process of finding new uses for existing drugs) receives more appraisals as an efficient way that allows for reducing the time, resources, and risks associated with the development of new drugs. In this research, we design a novel computational platform that integrates gene expression data, biological networks, and the PDOD database to identify possible drug-repositioning agents for PD therapy. By using machine learning approaches like the RWR algorithm and PDOD scoring system we arrange drug-disease conversions and sort our potential sandboxes according to their possible efficacy. We propose gene expression analysis, network prioritization, and drug target data analysis to arrive at a comprehensive evaluation of drug repurposing chances. Our study results highlight such therapies as promising drug candidates to conduct further research on PD treatment. We also provide the rationale for promising drug repurposing ideas by using various sources of data and computational approaches.