Fingerprinting CANDO: Increased Accuracy with Structure- and Ligand-Based Shotgun Drug Repurposing

We have upgraded our Computational Analysis of Novel Drug Opportunities (CANDO) platform for shotgun drug repurposing by including ligand-based, data fusion, and decision tree pipelines. The goal of shotgun drug repurposing is to screen and rank every existing human use drug or compound for every disease/indication. The first version of CANDO implemented a structure-based pipeline that modeled interactions between compounds and proteins on a large scale, generating compound–proteome interaction signatures used to infer the similarity of drug behavior; the new pipelines accomplish this by incorporating molecular fingerprints and the Tanimoto coefficient. We obtain improved benchmarking performance with the new pipelines across all three evaluation metrics used: average indication accuracy, pairwise accuracy, and coverage. The best performing pipeline achieves an average indication accuracy of 19.0% at the top10 cutoff, compared to 11.7% for v1, and 2.2% for a random control. Our results demonstrate that the CANDO drug recovery accuracy is substantially improved by integrating multiple pipelines, thereby enhancing our ability to generate putative therapeutic repurposing candidates, and increasing drug discovery efficiency.