Identifying Unexpected Therapeutic Targets via Chemical-Protein Interactome

Drug medications inevitably affect not only their intended protein targets but also other proteins as well. In this study we examined the hypothesis that drugs that share the same therapeutic effect also share a common therapeutic mechanism by targeting not only known drug targets, but also by interacting unexpectedly on the same cryptic targets. By constructing and mining an Alzheimer's disease (AD) drug-oriented chemical-protein interactome (CPI) using a matrix of 10 drug molecules known to treat AD towards 401 human protein pockets, we found that such cryptic targets exist. We recovered from CPI the only validated therapeutic target of AD, acetylcholinesterase (ACHE), and highlighted several other putative targets. For example, we discovered that estrogen receptor (ER) and histone deacetylase (HDAC), which have recently been identified as two new therapeutic targets of AD, might already have been targeted by the marketed AD drugs. We further established that the CPI profile of a drug can reflect its interacting character towards multi-protein sets, and that drugs with the same therapeutic attribute will share a similar interacting profile. These findings indicate that the CPI could represent the landscape of chemical-protein interactions and uncover “behind-the-scenes” aspects of the therapeutic mechanisms of existing drugs, providing testable hypotheses of the key nodes for network pharmacology or brand new drug targets for one-target pharmacology paradigm.