Drugs don’t always behave exactly as expected. While researchers may develop a drug to perform one specific function that may be tailored to work for a specific genetic profile, sometimes the drug might perform several other functions outside of its intended purpose.

This concept of drugs having multiple functions, called polypharmacology, may lead to unintended consequences. This is a common occurrence for cancer drugs in clinical trials that can have harmful side effects and treatment toxicity.

But polypharmacology may, in fact, be the norm for most drugs, not the exception. So rather than seeing a drug’s ability to perform many functions as a flaw, biomedical data scientists like me and my lab colleagues believe that it can be used to our advantage in designing drugs that address the full complexity of biology.

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