Computational approaches for predicting drug-disease associations: a comprehensive review

In recent decades, traditional drug research and development have been facing challenges such as high cost, long timelines, and high risks. To address these issues, many computational approaches have been proposed for predicting the relationship between drugs and diseases through drug repositioning, aiming to reduce the cost, development cycle and risks associated with developing new drugs. Researchers have explored different computational methods to predict drug-disease associations, including drug side effects-disease associations, drug-target associations, and miRNA-disease associations. In this comprehensive review, we focus on recent advances in predicting drug-disease association methods for drug repositioning. We first categorize these methods into several groups, including neural network-based algorithms, matrix-based algorithms, recommendation algorithms, link-based reasoning algorithms, and text mining and semantic reasoning. Then, we compare the prediction performance of existing drug-disease association prediction algorithms. Lastly, we discuss the current challenges and future perspectives in the field of drug-disease associations. © Higher Education Press 2025.