Chemotext: A Publicly Available Web Server for Mining Drug–Target–Disease Relationships in PubMed

Elucidation of the
mechanistic relationships between drugs, their
targets, and diseases is at the core of modern drug discovery research.
Thousands of studies relevant to the drug–target–disease
(DTD) triangle have been published and annotated in the Medline/PubMed
database. Mining this database affords rapid identification of all
published studies that confirm connections between vertices of this
triangle or enable new inferences of such connections. To this end,
we describe the development of Chemotext, a publicly available Web
server that mines the entire compendium of published literature in
PubMed annotated by Medline Subject Heading (MeSH) terms. The goal
of Chemotext is to identify all known DTD relationships and infer
missing links between vertices of the DTD triangle. As a proof-of-concept,
we show that Chemotext could be instrumental in generating new drug
repurposing hypotheses or annotating clinical outcomes pathways for
known drugs. The Chemotext Web server is freely available at http://chemotext.mml.unc.edu.