Prediction of Therapeutic Targets for Pharmacological Intervention in Alcoholism through Signaling Pathway Enrichment Analysis of Prefrontal Cortex RNA-seq Data

The aim of this study was to predict targets for the pharmacological correction of alcoholism by enriching biological processes with transcriptional data from postmortem material of the human dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. RNA-seq data from 96 patients from the open GEO database was analyzed. Differential expression analysis was performed using the DESeq2 method. Enrichment of biological processes was performed using the GSEA method against the GO:BP database. Connectivity Map analysis was used to identify pharmacological agents. Sixty-one significantly differentially expressed genes were detected. Using GSEA, we identified the relationship between changes in gene expression and biological processes in the body. Connectivity Map analysis identified three pharmacological classes with a potential effect correcting the predicted changes: JAK kinase inhibitors, ATPase inhibitors, and chemokine receptor antagonists.