GenCoNet

GenCoNet – A Graph Database for the Analysis of Comorbidities by Gene Networks

Alban Shoshi, Ralf Hofestädt, Olga Zolotareva, Marcel Friedrichs, Alex Maier, Vladimir A. Ivanisenko, Victor E. Dosenko, Elena Yu Bragina

The prevalence of comorbid diseases poses a major health issue for millions of people worldwide and an enormous socio-economic burden for society. The molecular mechanisms for the development of comorbidities need to be investigated. For this purpose, a workflow system was developed to aggregate data on biomedical entities from heterogeneous data sources. The process of integrating and merging all data sources of the workflow system was implemented as a semi-automatic pipeline that provides the import, fusion, and analysis of the highly connected biomedical data in a Neo4j database GenCoNet. As a starting point, data on the common comorbid diseases essential hypertension and bronchial asthma was integrated. GenCoNet (https://genconet.kalis-amts.de) is a curated database that provides a better understanding of hereditary bases of comorbidities.

Results

The following results table was extracted from the Neo4j database. It represents all integrated drugs that treat either asthma or essential hypertension and are tagged as approved in DrugBank. Additional drugs contained in the database but not listed here are either not approved or have contraindicates but no treats relationships.