NetControl4BioMed: a web-based platform for controllability analysis of protein-protein interaction networks

Victor-Bogdan Popescu, José Ángel Sánchez Martín, Daniela Schacherer, Sadra Safadoust, Negin Majidi, Andrei Andronescu, Alexandru Nedea, Diana Ion, Eduard Mititelu, Eugen Czeizler, Ion Petre

Abstract: There is an increasing amount of data coming from genome-wide studies identifying disease-specific survivability-essential proteins and host factors critical to a cell becoming infected. Targeting such proteins has a strong potential for targeted, precision therapies. Typically however, too few of them are drug targetable. An alternative approach is to influence them through drug targetable proteins upstream of them. Structural target network controllability is a suitable solution to this problem. It aims to discover suitable source nodes (e.g. drug targetable proteins) in a directed interaction network that can control (through a suitable set of input functions) a desired set of targets.