title: The BioAssay network and its implications to future therapeutic discovery.
abstract: BACKGROUND
  Despite intense investment growth and technology development, there is an observed bottleneck in drug discovery and development over the past decade. NIH started the Molecular Libraries Initiative (MLI) in 2003 to enlarge the pool for potential drug targets, especially from the "undruggable" part of human genome, and potential drug candidates from much broader types of drug-like small molecules. All results are being made publicly available in a web portal called PubChem.
  
  
  RESULTS
  In this paper we construct a network from bioassay data in PubChem, apply network biology concepts to characterize this bioassay network, integrate information from multiple biological databases (e.g. DrugBank, OMIM, and UniHI), and systematically analyze the potential of bioassay targets being new drug targets in the context of complex biological networks. We propose a model to quantitatively prioritize this druggability of bioassay targets, and literature evidence was found to confirm our prioritization of bioassay targets at a roughly 70% accuracy.
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  Our analysis provide some measures of the value of the MLI data as a resource for both basic chemical biology research and future therapeutic discovery.
authors: Center for Bioinformatics, University of Kansas, Lawrence, KS 66045, USA.
authors: Jintao
authors: J
authors: Zhang
authors: Gerald H
authors: GH
authors: Lushington
authors: Jun
authors: J
authors: Huan
mesh_terms: D000818:Animals; D001681:Biological Assay; D016208:Databases, Factual; D055808:Drug Discovery; D004358:Drug Therapy; D006801:Humans; D020407:Internet; D051379:Mice; D018345:Mice, Knockout; D011506:Proteins / Q000378:metabolism
chemical_list: D011506:Proteins