IDMap: Facilitating the detection of potential leads with therapeutic targets

Abstract

Pharmaceutical industry has been striving to reduce the costs of drug development and increase productivity. Among the many different attempts, drug repositioning (retargeting existing drugs) comes into the spotlight because of its financial efficiency. We introduce IDMap which predicts novel relationships between targets and chemicals and thus is capable of repositioning the marketed drugs by using text mining and chemical structure information. Also capable of mapping commercial chemicals to possible drug targets and vice versa, IDMap creates convenient environments for identifying the potential lead and its targets, especially in the field of drug repositioning. © The Author 2008. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved.