Guiding Drug Repositioning for Cancers Based on Drug Similarity Networks.

Drug repositioning aims to discover novel clinical benefits of existing drugs, is an effective way to develop drugs for complex diseases such as cancer and may facilitate the process of traditional drug development. Meanwhile, network-based computational biology approaches, which allow the integration of information from different aspects to understand the relationships between biomolecules, has been successfully applied to drug repurposing. In this work, we developed a new strategy for network-based drug repositioning against cancer. Combining the mechanism of action and clinical efficacy of the drugs, a cancer-related drug similarity network was constructed, and the correlation score of each drug with a specific cancer was quantified. The top 5% of scoring drugs were reviewed for stability and druggable potential to identify potential repositionable drugs. Of the 11 potentially repurposable drugs for non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC), 10 were confirmed by clinical trial articles and databases. The targets of these drugs were significantly enriched in cancer-related pathways and significantly associated with the prognosis of NSCLC. In light of the successful application of our approach to colorectal cancer as well, it provides an effective clue and valuable perspective for drug repurposing in cancer.

Leader gene identification for digestive system cancers based on human subcellular location and cancer-related characteristics in protein-protein interaction networks.

Stomach, liver, and colon cancers are the most common digestive system cancers leading to mortality. Cancer leader genes were identified in the current study as the genes that contribute to tumor initiation and could shed light on the molecular mechanisms in tumorigenesis. An integrated procedure was proposed to identify cancer leader genes based on subcellular location information and cancer-related characteristics considering the effects of nodes on their neighbors in human protein-protein interaction networks. A total of 69, 43, and 64 leader genes were identified for stomach, liver, and colon cancers, respectively. Furthermore, literature reviews and experimental data including protein expression levels and independent datasets from other databases all verified their association with corresponding cancer types. These final leader genes were expected to be used as diagnostic biomarkers and targets for new treatment strategies. The procedure for identifying cancer leader genes could be expanded to open up a window into the mechanisms, early diagnosis, and treatment of other cancer types.

HarMI: Human Activity Recognition Via Multi-Modality Incremental Learning.

Nowadays, with the development of various kinds of sensors in smartphones or wearable devices, human activity recognition (HAR) has been widely researched and has numerous applications in healthcare, smart city, etc. Many techniques based on hand-crafted feature engineering or deep neural network have been proposed for sensor based HAR. However, these existing methods usually recognize activities offline, which means the whole data should be collected before training, occupying large-capacity storage space. Moreover, once the offline model training finished, the trained model can't recognize new activities unless retraining from the start, thus with a high cost of time and space. In this paper, we propose a multi-modality incremental learning model, called HarMI, with continuous learning ability. The proposed HarMI model can start training quickly with little storage space and easily learn new activities without storing previous training data. In detail, we first adopt attention mechanism to align heterogeneous sensor data with different frequencies. In addition, to overcome catastrophic forgetting in incremental learning, HarMI utilizes the elastic weight consolidation and canonical correlation analysis from a multi-modality perspective. Extensive experiments based on two public datasets demonstrate that HarMI can achieve a superior performance compared with several state-of-the-arts.