ABSTRACT
Many medications that have already been licensed for specific diseases have known protein targets that may be pertinent to other disease types as well. Furthermore, a systematic approach to identify druggable genes in diverse diseases should help to speed up the development of novel medications for these targets, even though no specific treatments are available at the present time. Conventional drug production involves finding a protein target thought to be relevant for disease etiology and screening chemicals that improve the target’s activity. While this technique has remained effective for years, current results imply that its future success is limited, owing to the widespread irreproducibility of biologically intricate structures influencing the disease phenotypes of single fundamental disease driver. Network medicine, a new subject combining network science and system biology to evaluate multifarious disease and biological systems, is providing novel means of overcoming limitations of conventional drug development. The absolute protein-protein interaction network aids in identifying sub-networks that help in regulating specific diseases, enlightening putative disease drivers, and investigating the consequences of novel treatments, either alone or in combinations. This approach to drug discovery offers novel unbiased prospects to expand our understanding of disease progressions and precision treatments. This chapter initially investigates therapeutic targets, treatment options, and screening procedures that are most effectual in identifying new trivial molecule medications. Together with improved capacities for systematizing the handling of hundreds of animals like zebrafish, this leads to a rise in the requirement for target deconvolution. In this chapter, the most common approaches for target identification, deconvolution, and validation are summarized in a methodical manner for a nonspecialist audience.
