Disease Similarity

Over the past few decades proteomics has enabled great advances in our understanding of disease and our perspective evolved from single gene – disease links to a more comprehensive module – disease model.

Since related diseases are associated to overlapping regions of the interactome, quantifying this molecular similarity would be useful to transfer knowledge between diseases and in particular to provide insight into the less studied ones. Shedding light on the relationships between the diseases would also provide a starting point for associating them to their causal genes as well as the help find potential targets for drugs.

We have developed a method able to summarise the information available in the biomedical literature databases. By obtaining the MeSH terms associated with the publications referenced in OMIM, we are able to obtain a single number that accurately reflects the molecular relatedness between hereditary diseases.

References

Horacio Caniza, Alfonso E. Romero and Alberto Paccanaro
A network medicine approach to quantify distance between hereditary disease modules on the interactome 
Nature Scientific Reports 5, 17658; DOI: 10.1038/srep17658 (2015).