A Novel Prioritization Method in Identifying Recurrent Venous Thromboembolism-Related Genes

Identifying the genes involved in venous thromboembolism (VTE) recurrence is important not only for understanding the pathogenesis but also for discovering the therapeutic targets. We proposed a novel prioritization method called Function-Interaction-Pearson (FIP) by creating gene-disease similarity scores to prioritize candidate genes underling VTE. The scores were calculated by integrating and optimizing three types of resources including gene expression, gene ontology and protein-protein interaction. As a result, 124 out of top 200 prioritized candidate genes had been confirmed in literature, among which there were 34 antithrombotic drug targets. Compared with two well-known gene prioritization tools Endeavour and ToppNet, FIP was shown to have better performance. The approach provides a valuable alternative for drug targets discovery and disease therapy.