title: VisANT 4.0: Integrative network platform to connect genes, drugs, diseases and therapies.
abstract: With the rapid accumulation of our knowledge on diseases, disease-related genes and drug targets, network-based analysis plays an increasingly important role in systems biology, systems pharmacology and translational science. The new release of VisANT aims to provide new functions to facilitate the convenient network analysis of diseases, therapies, genes and drugs. With improved understanding of the mechanisms of complex diseases and drug actions through network analysis, novel drug methods (e.g., drug repositioning, multi-target drug and combination therapy) can be designed. More specifically, the new update includes (i) integrated search and navigation of disease and drug hierarchies; (ii) integrated disease-gene, therapy-drug and drug-target association to aid the network construction and filtering; (iii) annotation of genes/drugs using disease/therapy information; (iv) prediction of associated diseases/therapies for a given set of genes/drugs using enrichment analysis; (v) network transformation to support construction of versatile network of drugs, genes, diseases and therapies; (vi) enhanced user interface using docking windows to allow easy customization of node and edge properties with build-in legend node to distinguish different node type. VisANT is freely available at: http://visant.bu.edu.
authors.affiliation: Center for Advanced Genomic Technology, Bioinformatics Program, Boston University, Boston, MA 02215, USA. zhenjun.hu@gmail.com
authors.forename: Zhenjun
authors.initials: Z
authors.lastname: Hu
authors.forename: Yi-Chien
authors.initials: YC
authors.lastname: Chang
authors.forename: Yan
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Wang
authors.forename: Chia-Ling
authors.initials: CL
authors.lastname: Huang
authors.forename: Yang
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Liu
authors.forename: Feng
authors.initials: F
authors.lastname: Tian
authors.forename: Brian
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: Granger
authors.forename: Charles
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Delisi
mesh_terms: D004194:Disease / Q000235:genetics*; D055808:Drug Discovery; D004358:Drug Therapy; D005796:Genes; D006801:Humans; D020407:Internet; D012984:Software