Centrality searching on signal transduction pathway for drug selection support system in targeted cancer therapy

Abstract

© 2016 IEEE. Cancer is a leading cause of death in the world. Many researchers are still searching for cancer treatments as well. This paper proposes a technique to support the cancer treatments, call Targeted Cancer Therapy. This treatment affects specific to cancer cells to inhibit signal transduction processes because the signal transduction is the cause of the growth and division of cancer cells. Normally, this treatment will take drugs to the target gene that causes cancer. However, sometimes, there is no drug for the target gene. Signal transduction pathway can be used for analyzing the related drug. The drug searching in pathway is considered in this research. Graph traversal such as Depth First Search (DFS) and Breadth First Search (BFS) are used as the searching techniques in the pathway. Centrality measures are applied to graph traversal in order to increase performance of search results. Drug results are scored and measured. Experimental results show that the betweenness centrality on depth first search yields a set of suitable drugs that is higher than those of degree and closeness centrality.