In the last issue of NF News, we wrote about the NF Finder and how NF patients are benefiting from drugs developed for other diseases.
We’re excited to share that, just this week, President and Chief Scientific Officer Annette Bakker, as a member of an international team of researchers, published an article in Nucleic Acids Research about drug repositioning and the NFFinder. NFFinder is a tool that allows researchers to compare genetic profiles of different NF tumor and tissue types against a database of genetic profiles from many other types of diseases and cancers.
NFFinder: an online bioinformatics tool for searching similar transcriptomics experiments in the context of drug repositioning
Abstract Drug repositioning, using known drugs for treating conditions different from those the drug was originally designed to treat, is an important drug discovery tool that allows for a faster and cheaper development process by using drugs that are already approved or in an advanced trial stage for another purpose. This is especially relevant for orphan diseases because they affect too few people to make drug researchde novo economically viable. In this paper we present NFFinder, a bioinformatics tool for identifying potential useful drugs in the context of orphan diseases. NFFinder uses transcriptomic data to find relationships between drugs, diseases and a phenotype of interest, as well as identifying experts having published on that domain. The application shows in a dashboard a series of graphics and tables designed to help researchers formulate repositioning hypotheses and identify potential biological relationships between drugs and diseases.
Click here to read the full article. NFFinder is freely available at http://nffinder.cnb.csic.es.
