And it works! The program was able to find a number of exciting new associations between genes and the diseases that they may cause, ones that had never before been written about in the literature.

For example, there is a condition known as Graves' disease that normally causes hyperthyroidism, a condition in which the thyroid produces too much hormone. Symptoms include heat intolerance and eyes that stick out more prominently, yielding a somewhat bug-eyed appearance for sufferers. CoPub Discovery, when automatically plowing through the large database, found a number of genes that had never before been implicated in Graves' that might be involved in causing the disease. Specifically, it found a large cluster of genes related to something known as programmed cell death.

Programmed cell death is not nearly as scary as it sounds. Our bodies often require the death of individual cells in order to perform correctly, and there is a set of genes in our cells tailored for this purpose. For example, during embryonic development, our hands initially have webbing between the fingers. But prior to birth the cells in the webbing are given the signal to die, causing us to not have webbed hands. Webbed hands and feet only occur when the signal is given incorrectly, or when these genes don't work properly.

What CoPub Discovery computationally hypothesized is that when these programmed cell death genes don't work properly in other ways, a cascade of effects might follow, eventually leading to the condition known as Graves' disease. CoPub Discovery has also found relationships between drugs and diseases and determined other previously unknown effects of currently used drugs. For example, while a medicine might be used to help treatment for a specific condition, not all of its effects might be known. Using the CoPub Discovery engine and the concept of undiscovered public knowledge, it becomes possible to actually see what the other effects of such a drug might be.

The researchers behind CoPub Discovery did something even more impressive. Rather than simply put forth a tool and a number of computationally generated hypotheses -- although this is impressive by itself -- they actually tested some of the discoveries in the laboratory. They wanted to see if these pieces of newly revealed knowledge are actually true. Specifically, CoPub Discovery predicted that two drugs, dephostatin and damnacanthal, could be used to slow the reproduction and proliferation of a group of cells. They found that the drugs actually worked: the larger the dose of these drugs, the more the cells' growth was inhibited. This concept is known as drug repurposing, where hidden knowledge is used to determine that medicines are useful in treating conditions or diseases entirely different from their original purposes.