Introduction: Liver cancer is the fourth most common cancer in the world and the main cause of death in the world in such a way that it leads to the death of 800,000 people in the world every year. The main causes of this disease are chronic viral hepatitis, high alcohol consumption, and non-alcoholic fatty liver disease. Drug repurposing is a useful method of using existing FDA-approved drugs. This method identifies the right medicine for the disease by spending less time and money. Since in cancer, chemotherapy drugs are drugs that reduce a person's quality of life, using other drugs with fewer side effects that are among non-cancer drugs can be helpful.
Methods: This study used a computational drug repurposing pipeline to discover candidate drugs based on PD differential gene expression signatures derived from RNA sequencing data. The transcriptional sample of plasma was compared with accession code GSE142987 from the GEO database (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/geo/). Some samples were not available through the dataset, and only 34 plasma samples of people with liver cancer and 10 plasma samples of healthy people were analyzed. Differentially expressed genes (DEGs) between plasma samples of liver cancer subjects and plasma samples of healthy subjects were obtained using GEO2R. Then, the integrated library of network-based signatures (LINCS) was used to identify potential drugs that can reverse the expression of DEGs. Then, by reviewing the significant literature and drug bank studies (https://go.drugbank.com), the top-ranked drugs with the highest p-value were selected. The study identified 250 genes commonly affected by the disease. Among them, genes with |log2FC| > 1 and a P-value < 0.05were identified as DEGs: 59 up-regulated genes and 191 down-regulated genes.
Results: The results of the data analysis in this study showed that VernaKalant drug can have a positive effect in the treatment of liver cancer.
Conclusion: VernaKalant is an antiarrhythmic drug for rapid conversion of atrial fibrillation to sinus rhythm and may be useful in the treatment of liver cancer. However, it is not clear exactly which genes this drug affects. Arrhythmia patients in case of diseases such as liver cancer can use these drugs approved by the American Food and Drug Administration, and these drugs with their dual effects are effective in both improving the patient and reducing the consumption of multiple drugs.
Keywords: RNA sequencing; liver cancer; Drug repurposing