Please join us for a Bioengineering Spring Seminar
12:00 – 1:00 pm, 106 Stanley Hall

“Simulating Drug Secondary Effects to Infer Combinations and Altered Disease Pathways”

Presented by Professor Jennifer Wilson, UCLA

Abstract:
Already, we understand that drugs can have multiple effects, including side-effects and repurposing effects, and further that they often act through on- and off- target protein binding. Yet these “secondary effects” are not routinely used for explaining how drugs work. Protein-protein interaction networks are an ideal scaffold for understanding drug secondary effects because these networks can describe downstream and off-target effects. In this talk I will demonstrate how these networks allow us to learn new disease biology – specifically how unintended drug effects on immune system activation are associated with differences in overall survival for patients with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), and how drug off-target effects allow us to predict effective drug combinations in oncology.