Network analysis with PubChem BioAssay: Preliminary study on drug abuse

BioAssay involves the use of live animal or plant (in vivo) or tissue or cell (in vitro) to determine the biological activity of a substance, such as hormone or drug, which plays a key role especially in evaluation of clinical efficacy for drug development. How to better utilize the biological information contained in the BioAssay for systematical identification of novel biological associations is the primary focus of this study. As one of top 10 leading cause of death, there is an urgent need to better understand the biological mechanism of drug abuse for its further prevention and management. More specifically, we developed a biological network by integrating information about chemical, gene, and disease, which are relevant to drug abuse, from PubChem BioAssay. We performed network analysis over the network to identify the high-influence nodes based on common centrality measures, and subsequently, we conducted perturbation to prioritize the final list of novel associations specific to drug abuse.