Systems Biology approaches to Drug Repurposing: 3 month industrial placement at GlaxoSmithKline, Stevenage

Drug repositioning is the application of established, approved compounds to a novel therapeutic application. This process is an ever-evolving issue in the area of drug development, having the potential to reduce both drug development costs and the time taken for a drug to reach the market. Many repositioned drugs currently on the market have been discovered through either serendipitous or rational observations, neither of which are efficient methods given the potentially huge search space of drug-target, drug-disease interactions. Systematic approaches to the searching of such solution spaces are required to provide an efficient and scalable alternative to manual investigations.

Systems biology has the potential to enable the development of novel approaches to understanding the action of therapeutic compounds but requires an integrative approach to biological data. Integrated networks can facilitate this approach by combining multiple sources of evidence to provide a rich description of drugs, their targets and their interactions. These semantically-rich networks offer a computationally tractable approach to systematically mining data for drug repositioning opportunities. During this talk I will introduce you to my PhD work before talking about my recent industrial experience during which I spent 3 months working at GlaxoSmithKline in Stevenage.​