Hiding in Plain Sight: Finding New Targets for Old Drugs
12th January 2014
In late 2011, mice with small-cell lung cancer had their tumors reduced by an antidepressant called imipramine. The basis of the study was the idea that the cancer switches certain genes on, while imipramine turns them off. A neat trick, but no one would have thought to test it if it hadn’t been for analytics developed by Stanford data scientist Atul Butte.
Butte thinks of diseases not in terms of symptoms but of the genes they activate (or deactivate). In that light, conditions that seem unrelated, like heart attack and muscular dystrophy, are kindred, because they show similar genetic patterns. So would heart attack medicine work on muscular dystrophy? Possibly.