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.

Abstract Network Medicine has improved the mechanistic understanding of disease, offering quantitative insights into disease mechanisms, comorbidities, and novel diagnostic tools and therapeutic treatments. Yet, most network-based approaches rely on a comprehensive map of protein-protein interactions, ignoring interactions mediated by non-coding RNAs (ncRNAs). Here, we systematically combine experimentally confirmed binding interactions mediated by ncRNA with protein-protein interactions, constructing the first comprehensive network of all physical interactions in the human cell.