Computational drug repositioning identifies niclosamide and tribromsalan as inhibitors of Mycobacterium tuberculosis and Mycobacterium abscessus

Tuberculosis (TB) is still a major global health challenge, killing over 1.5 million people each year, and hence, there is a need to identify and develop novel treatments for Mycobacterium tuberculosis (M. tuberculosis). The prevalence of infections caused by nontuberculous mycobacteria (NTM) is also increasing and has overtaken TB cases in the United States and much of the developed world. Mycobacterium abscessus (M. abscessus) is one of the most frequently encountered NTM and is difficult to treat. We describe the use of drug-disease association using a semantic knowledge graph approach combined with machine learning models that has enabled the identification of several molecules for testing anti-mycobacterial activity. We established that niclosamide (M. tuberculosis IC90 2.95 μM; M. abscessus IC90 59.1 μM) and tribromsalan (M. tuberculosis IC90 76.92 μM; M. abscessus IC90 147.4 μM) inhibit M. tuberculosis and M. abscessus in vitro. To investigate the mode of action, we determined the transcriptional response of M. tuberculosis and M. abscessus to both compounds in axenic log phase, demonstrating a broad effect on gene expression that differed from known M. tuberculosis inhibitors. Both compounds elicited transcriptional responses indicative of respiratory pathway stress and the dysregulation of fatty acid metabolism.

Knowledge graph analytics platform with LINCS and IDG for Parkinson's disease target illumination

Background

LINCS, "Library of Integrated Network-based Cellular Signatures", and IDG, "Illuminating the Druggable Genome", are both NIH projects and consortia that have generated rich datasets for the study of the molecular basis of human health and disease. LINCS L1000 expression signatures provide unbiased systems/omics experimental evidence. IDG provides compiled and curated knowledge for illumination and prioritization of novel drug target hypotheses. Together, these resources can support a powerful new approach to identifying novel drug targets for complex diseases, such as Parkinson's disease (PD), which continues to inflict severe harm on human health, and resist traditional research approaches.

Results

Integrating LINCS and IDG, we built the Knowledge Graph Analytics Platform (KGAP) to support an important use case: identification and prioritization of drug target hypotheses for associated diseases. The KGAP approach includes strong semantics interpretable by domain scientists and a robust, high performance implementation of a graph database and related analytical methods. Illustrating the value of our approach, we investigated results from queries relevant to PD. Approved PD drug indications from IDG’s resource DrugCentral were used as starting points for evidence paths exploring chemogenomic space via LINCS expression signatures for associated genes, evaluated as target hypotheses by integration with IDG. The KG-analytic scoring function was validated against a gold standard dataset of genes associated with PD as elucidated, published mechanism-of-action drug targets, also from DrugCentral. IDG's resource TIN-X was used to rank and filter KGAP results for novel PD targets, and one, SYNGR3 (Synaptogyrin-3), was manually investigated further as a case study and plausible new drug target for PD.

Conclusions

The synergy of LINCS and IDG, via KG methods, empowers graph analytics methods for the investigation of the molecular basis of complex diseases, and specifically for identification and prioritization of novel drug targets. The KGAP approach enables downstream applications via integration with resources similarly aligned with modern KG methodology. The generality of the approach indicates that KGAP is applicable to many disease areas, in addition to PD, the focus of this paper.

Supplementary Information

The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1186/s12859-021-04530-9.