CaNDis: a web server for investigation of causal relationships between diseases, drugs and drug targets

Motivation: Causal biological interaction networks represent cellular regulatory pathways. Their fusion with other biological data enables insights into disease mechanisms and novel opportunities for drug discovery.

Results: We developed Causal Network of Diseases (CaNDis), a web server for the exploration of a human causal interaction network, which we expanded with data on diseases and FDA-approved drugs, on the basis of which we constructed a disease-disease network in which the links represent the similarity between diseases. We show how CaNDis can be used to identify candidate genes with known and novel roles in disease co-occurrence and drug-drug interactions.

Availabilityand implementation: CaNDis is freely available to academic users at http://candis.ijs.si and http://candis.insilab.org.

Supplementary information: Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.