Drug-Target Networks

Far from the traditional view of selective drug-target interactions, the recent accumulation of large amounts of interaction data for small-molecule drugs and protein targets requires innovative visualisation and analysis tools that are able to deal with what has become a truly complex system. In this context, network theory offers both a robust and illustrative framework to investigate drug-target connections and has been swiftly and widely embraced by the chemical biology and molecular informatics communities. A survey of the most recent applications of drug-target networks to detect cross-pharmacology relationships among targets and to identify new targets for known drugs is provided. Finally, some of the current limitations are also discussed, including the actual completeness of interaction data and the information loss intrinsically associated with the one-mode projection of drug-target networks.