DiseaseConnect: A Comprehensive Web Server for Mechanism-Based Disease-Disease Connections

摘要

The DiseaseConnect (http://disease-connect.org) is a web server for disease analysis and network visualization of a comprehensive knowledge base of the disease connectivity map. The traditional disease classification system groups diseases with similar clinical symptoms and phenotypic traits. Thus, diseases with entirely different underlying pathologies could be grouped together, leading to similar treatment design. Such problems could be avoided if diseases can be classified based on their molecular mechanisms. Connecting diseases with similar pathogenesis mechanisms could inspire novel strategies for effective repositioning existing drugs and therapies. Although there have been several studies attempting to generate disease connectivity networks, they have not yet touched the enormous and rapidly growing public repositories of disease-related omics data and biological literature data, two primary resources capable of providing insights into the mechanisms of disease connections at an unprecedented level of detail.