Network Pharmacology Strategies Toward Multi-Target Anticancer Therapies: From Computational Models to Experimental Design Principles
Polypharmacology has emerged as novel means in drug discovery for improving treatment response in clinical use. However, to really capitalize on the polypharmacological effects of drugs, there is a critical need to better model and understand how the complex interactions between drugs
and their cellular targets contribute to drug efficacy and possible side effects. Network graphs provide a convenient modeling framework for dealing with the fact that most drugs act on cellular systems through targeting multiple proteins both through on-target and off-target binding. Network
pharmacology models aim at addressing questions such as how and where in the disease network should one target to inhibit disease phenotypes, such as cancer growth, ideally leading to therapies that are less vulnerable to drug resistance and side effects by means of attacking the disease network
at the systems level through synergistic and synthetic lethal interactions. Since the exponentially increasing number of potential drug target combinations makes pure experimental approach quickly unfeasible, this review depicts a number of computational models and algorithms that can effectively
reduce the search space for determining the most promising combinations for experimental evaluation. Such computational-experimental strategies are geared toward realizing the full potential of multi-target treatments in different disease phenotypes. Our specific focus is on system-level network
approaches to polypharmacology designs in anticancer drug discovery, where we give representative examples of how network-centric modeling may offer systematic strategies toward better understanding and even predicting the phenotypic responses to multi-target therapies.
Keywords: Network pharmacology; anticancer therapies; computational models; experimental design
Document Type: Research Article
Publication date: January 1, 2014
- Current Pharmaceutical Design publishes timely in-depth reviews covering all aspects of current research in rational drug design. Each issue is devoted to a single major therapeutic area. A Guest Editor who is an acknowledged authority in a therapeutic field has solicits for each issue comprehensive and timely reviews from leading researchers in the pharmaceutical industry and academia.
Each thematic issue of Current Pharmaceutical Design covers all subject areas of major importance to modern drug design, including: medicinal chemistry, pharmacology, drug targets and disease mechanism. - Editorial Board
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