Using drug similarities for discovery of possible adverse reactions

Abstract

We propose a new computational method for discovery of possible adverse drug reactions. The method consists of two key steps. First we use openly available resources to semi-automatically compile a consolidated data set describing drugs and their features (e.g., chemical structure, related targets, indications or known adverse reaction). The data set is represented as a graph, which allows for definition of graph-based similarity metrics. The metrics can then be used for propagating known adverse reactions between similar drugs, which leads to weighted (i.e., ranked) predictions of previously unknown links between drugs and their possible side effects. We implemented the proposed method in the form of a software prototype and evaluated our approach by discarding known drug-side effect links from our data and checking whether our prototype is able to re-discover them. As this is an evaluation methodology used by several recent state of the art approaches, we could compare our results with them. Our approach scored best in all widely used metrics like precision, recall or the ratio of relevant predictions present among the top ranked results. The improvement was as much as 125.79% over the next best approach. For instance, the F1 score was 0.5606 (66.35% better than the next best method). Most importantly, in 95.32% of cases, the top five results contain at least one, but typically three correctly predicted side effect (36.05% better than the second best approach).