Multi-BIRW:a network-based algorithm for drug repurposing

This paper is based on Computational Biology with an eye towards medicine. In fact our aim is to identify new indications for existing drugs with a computational approach using Systems Biology, in order to speed up the market entry, avoiding some phases of drug development (for example toxicity tests) and with a lower cost. The method that we will discuss exploits the concept of Random Walk in a heterogeneous network, formed by a drug-drug and disease-disease similarity and known drug-disease associations. This is done by combining different types of data in order to connect more effectively two drugs or two diseases with a similarity score. At the end we integrate the known associations between drugs and diseases with the purpose of finding similarity values of new couples.