7 research outputs found
sPLINK : a hybrid federated tool as a robust alternative to meta-analysis in genome-wide association studies
Meta-analysis has been established as an effective approach to combining summary statistics of several genome-wide association studies (GWAS). However, the accuracy of meta-analysis can be attenuated in the presence of cross-study heterogeneity. We present sPLINK, a hybrid federated and user-friendly tool, which performs privacy-aware GWAS on distributed datasets while preserving the accuracy of the results. sPLINK is robust against heterogeneous distributions of data across cohorts while meta-analysis considerably loses accuracy in such scenarios. sPLINK achieves practical runtime and acceptable network usage for chi-square and linear/logistic regression tests.Peer reviewe
Drugst.One -- A plug-and-play solution for online systems medicine and network-based drug repurposing
In recent decades, the development of new drugs has become increasingly
expensive and inefficient, and the molecular mechanisms of most pharmaceuticals
remain poorly understood. In response, computational systems and network
medicine tools have emerged to identify potential drug repurposing candidates.
However, these tools often require complex installation and lack intuitive
visual network mining capabilities. To tackle these challenges, we introduce
Drugst.One, a platform that assists specialized computational medicine tools in
becoming user-friendly, web-based utilities for drug repurposing. With just
three lines of code, Drugst.One turns any systems biology software into an
interactive web tool for modeling and analyzing complex protein-drug-disease
networks. Demonstrating its broad adaptability, Drugst.One has been
successfully integrated with 21 computational systems medicine tools. Available
at https://drugst.one, Drugst.One has significant potential for streamlining
the drug discovery process, allowing researchers to focus on essential aspects
of pharmaceutical treatment research.Comment: 45 pages, 6 figures, 7 table
Computational strategies to combat COVID-19: useful tools to accelerate SARS-CoV-2 and coronavirus research
SARS-CoV-2 (severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2) is a novel virus of the family Coronaviridae. The virus causes the infectious disease COVID-19. The biology of coronaviruses has been studied for many years. However, bioinformatics tools designed explicitly for SARS-CoV-2 have only recently been developed as a rapid reaction to the need for fast detection, understanding and treatment of COVID-19. To control the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, it is of utmost importance to get insight into the evolution and pathogenesis of the virus. In this review, we cover bioinformatics workflows and tools for the routine detection of SARS-CoV-2 infection, the reliable analysis of sequencing data, the tracking of the COVID-19 pandemic and evaluation of containment measures, the study of coronavirus evolution, the discovery of potential drug targets and development of therapeutic strategies. For each tool, we briefly describe its use case and how it advances research specifically for SARS-CoV-2. All tools are free to use and available online, either through web applications or public code repositories.Peer Reviewe
Privacy-aware multi-institutional time-to-event studies.
Clinical time-to-event studies are dependent on large sample sizes, often not available at a single institution. However, this is countered by the fact that, particularly in the medical field, individual institutions are often legally unable to share their data, as medical data is subject to strong privacy protection due to its particular sensitivity. But the collection, and especially aggregation into centralized datasets, is also fraught with substantial legal risks and often outright unlawful. Existing solutions using federated learning have already demonstrated considerable potential as an alternative for central data collection. Unfortunately, current approaches are incomplete or not easily applicable in clinical studies owing to the complexity of federated infrastructures. This work presents privacy-aware and federated implementations of the most used time-to-event algorithms (survival curve, cumulative hazard rate, log-rank test, and Cox proportional hazards model) in clinical trials, based on a hybrid approach of federated learning, additive secret sharing, and differential privacy. On several benchmark datasets, we show that all algorithms produce highly similar, or in some cases, even identical results compared to traditional centralized time-to-event algorithms. Furthermore, we were able to reproduce the results of a previous clinical time-to-event study in various federated scenarios. All algorithms are accessible through the intuitive web-app Partea (https://partea.zbh.uni-hamburg.de), offering a graphical user interface for clinicians and non-computational researchers without programming knowledge. Partea removes the high infrastructural hurdles derived from existing federated learning approaches and removes the complexity of execution. Therefore, it is an easy-to-use alternative to central data collection, reducing bureaucratic efforts but also the legal risks associated with the processing of personal data to a minimum
Exploring the SARS-CoV-2 virus-host-drug interactome for drug repurposing
Information developed to understand the molecular mechanisms of SARS-CoV-2 infection for predicting drug repurposing candidates is time-consuming to integrate and explore. Here, the authors develop an interactive online platform for virus-host interactome exploration and drug (target) identification