Mining Drug Targets: The Challenges and a Proposed Framework

Drug target identification, being the first phase in drug discovery is becoming an overly time consuming process and in many cases produces inefficient results due to failure of conventional approaches to investigate large scale data. The main goal of this work is to identify drug targets, where there are genes or proteins associated with specific diseases. With the help of Microarray technology, the relationship between biological entities such as protein-protein, gene-gene and related chemical compounds are used as a means to identify drug targets. In this work, we focus on the challenges facing drug target discovery and propose a novel unified framework for mining disease related drug targets.