CaNDis: a web server for investigation of causal relationships between diseases, drugs and drug targets.

Abstract

Causal biological interaction networks represent cellular regulatory pathways. Their fusion with other biological data enables insights into disease mechanisms and novel opportunities for drug discovery. We developed Causal Network of Diseases (CaNDis), a web server for the exploration of a human causal interaction network, which we expanded with data on diseases and FDA-approved drugs, on the basis of which we constructed a disease-disease network in which the links represent the similarity between diseases. We show how CaNDis can be used to identify candidate genes with known and novel roles in disease co-occurrence and drug-drug interactions. CaNDis is freely available to academic users at http://candis.ijs.si and http://candis.insilab.org. Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.