From genes to drugs with a feature-rich web plugin

Network medicine is aiming to model and extract knowledge using network or graph structures to represent relationships between biological entities such as diseases, proteins, or drugs. These heterogeneous networks can be used to craft interpretable visualizations of biological interactions [1,2], to find and extract disease mechanisms [3], and to identify drug repurposing candidates [4,5]. We developed Drugst.One [6] a feature-rich web plugin, designed to streamline and facilitate the development and accessibility of network medicine applications and techniques.At its core, the Drugst.One Plugin is a highly customizable web plugin, that can be adjusted to any hosts web-page’s functional or stylistic requirements. It can be modified through an interactive configuration creator on the project page. Handed a set of genes or proteins, either manually or dynamically though scripts on the website, Drugst.One visualizes them in their network context. Users can then explore the network interactively or enrich the network with related drugs, diseases, or launch algorithms to identify disease modules or drug repurposing candidates with only one click. A Drugst.One server, provides JavaScript files for integration of the plugin, the execution of network algorithms, and a data warehousing system, which maintains multiple established protein- and drug-interaction database integrations and weekly updates most for some of them weekly.A ready-to-use version of Drugst.One is integrated into the homepage, usable through both, manual entering of entities of interest or HTTP-request-driven configuration, removing the immediate need to host an own specialized website. We further offer a Python package, which to provides a purely programmatic access to all Drugst.One functions and offer templates for different web frameworks to efficiently and easily set up a personalized Drugst.One-powered web tool.