Drug side effects are human phenotypic information. We have developed a method based on the comparison of side-effect profiles of drugs to predict whether two drugs share a target. Applied to 746 marketed drugs, 261 pairs of dissimilar drugs implicated in different therapeutic indications are predicted to share a target, hinting at new uses of marketed drugs.
We experimentally tested 20 of these unexpected drug-drug relations and confirmed 13, implying a physiological relevance of the novel drug-target relations and documenting the feasibility of utilizing phenotypic information for inferring molecular interactions