{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/the-clinical-trials-puzzle-how-network","title":"The Clinical Trials Puzzle: How Network Effects Limit Drug Discovery","arxiv_id":"2301.10709","date":"2023-01-25","proceeding":null,"authors":["Kishore Vasan","Deisy Gysi","Albert-Laszlo Barabasi"],"abstract":"The depth of knowledge offered by post-genomic medicine has carried the promise of new drugs, and cures for multiple diseases. To explore the degree to which this capability has materialized, we extract meta-data from 356,403 clinical trials spanning four decades, aiming to offer mechanistic insights into the innovation practices in drug discovery. We find that convention dominates over innovation, as over 96% of the recorded trials focus on previously tested drug targets, and the tested drugs target only 12% of the human interactome. If current patterns persist, it would take 170 years to target all druggable proteins. We uncover two network-based fundamental mechanisms that currently limit target discovery: preferential attachment, leading to the repeated exploration of previously targeted proteins; and local network effects, limiting exploration to proteins interacting with highly explored proteins. We build on these insights to develop a quantitative network-based model of drug discovery. We demonstrate that the model is able to accurately recreate the exploration patterns observed in clinical trials. Most importantly, we show that a network-based search strategy can widen the scope of drug discovery by guiding exploration to novel proteins that are part of under explored regions in the human interactome.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2301.10709v1","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2301.10709v1.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"the-clinical-trials-puzzle-how-network","repo_url":"https://github.com/barabasi-lab/clinical_trials","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":0,"framework":"none","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"drug-discovery","task_name":"Drug Discovery"}],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=2301.10709","mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}