Network Medicine 2D: Disease Module Drug Repositioning

Real diseases and real drugs are not single genes and single proteins — they are modules of interacting proteins sitting inside the human protein-interaction network. This simulator grows a scale-free Barabási–Albert network laid out as a pannable, zoomable 2D graph, marks a disease module (red) as a breadth-first neighbourhood of a seed protein, and lets you place a candidate drug's target module (blue) at a controllable hop-distance away. A live breadth-first-search engine computes the closest network distance d_AB and the Menche et al. network-based separation score S_AB between the two modules every time you move a slider — exactly the calculation network medicine uses to flag drug-repositioning candidates such as metformin's proximity to cancer disease modules. Negative S_AB means the modules overlap topologically and the drug is a plausible candidate; positive S_AB means they are functionally separated on the network. A live degree-distribution histogram shows the hub-dominated, scale-free shape the preferential-attachment rule produces.