The heterogeneous pharmacological medical biochemical network PharMeBINet

Abstract

Heterogeneous biomedical pharmacological databases are important for multiple fields in bioinformatics. Hetionet is a freely available database combining diverse entities and relationships from 29 public resources. Therefore, it is used as the basis for this project. 19 additional pharmacological medical and biological databases such as CTD, DrugBank, and ClinVar are parsed and integrated into Neo4j. Afterwards, the information is merged into the Hetionet structure. Different mapping methods are used such as external identification systems or name mapping. The resulting open-source Neo4j database PharMeBINet has 2,869,407 different nodes with 66 labels and 15,883,653 relationships with 208 edge types. It is a heterogeneous database containing interconnected information on ADRs, diseases, drugs, genes, gene variations, proteins, and more. Relationships between these entities represent drug-drug interactions or drug-causes-ADR relations, to name a few. It has much potential for developing further data analyses including machine learning applications. A web application for accessing the database is free to use for everyone and available at https://pharmebi.net. Additionally, the database is deposited on Zenodo at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.6578218.