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Rational drug repositioning by medical genetics

Nature Biotechnology volume 31, pages 1080–1082 (2013)Cite this article

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A Corrigendum to this article was published on 09 June 2014

This article has been updated

To the Editor:

Drug repositioning has been regarded as one of the most promising strategies for translational medicine. Common efforts to find new uses for existing drugs depend on text mining1, chemical genetics2 and network analysis3. In the April 2012 issue, Sanseau et al. proposed the use of genome-wide association studies (GWAS) for drug repositioning4. This strategy is consistent with the concept that human disease genes are highly druggable and that indications of derived drugs frequently match genetic disease traits5,6. Genetic diseases may result from loss of function (LOF) or gain of function (GOF) of mutated genes, and ligands may behave as agonists or antagonists of targets6. If a disease corresponds to a genetic disorder that arises from the GOF (or LOF) of mutated genes, antagonists (or agonists) for the target genes will be potential drugs6, whereas agonists (or antagonists) will exert undesirable effects. Therefore, medical genetics–based drug repositioning can be enhanced with information regarding the pathogenesis of genetic diseases and the action mode of ligands.

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Figure 1: Data processing pipeline.

Change history

  • 10 April 2014

    In the version of this article initially published, the corresponding author was given in the HTML as Z.-Y. Wang, rather than the H.-Y. Zhang. The error has been corrected in the HTML version of the article.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the National Basic Research Program of China (973 project, grants 2010CB126100 and 2012CB721000), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (grant 21173092) and the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (grants 2011PY142 and 2011PY027).

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Zhong-Yi Wang and Hong-Yu Zhang are at the National Key Laboratory of Crop Genetic Improvement, Center for Bioinformatics, College of Life Science and Technology, Huazhong Agricultural University, Wuhan, P.R. China

    Zhong-Yi Wang & Hong-Yu Zhang

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Correspondence to Hong-Yu Zhang.

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Wang, ZY., Zhang, HY. Rational drug repositioning by medical genetics. Nat Biotechnol 31, 1080–1082 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1038/nbt.2758

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