HGGT：Heterogeneous Gated Graph Transformer for Predicting Clinical Trial Success
Journal:
medRxiv
Published Date:
Jul 1, 2026
Abstract
Clinical trials are critical milestones in the drug development pipeline, yet their high failure rates and substantial costs underscore the need for robust predictive models. This study introduces a Heterogeneous Gated Graph Transformer (HGGT) model tailored to predict clinical trial success. Unlike existing methods that typically model trial-related entities in isolation or with homogeneous graphs, HGGT explicitly models the rich heterogeneous relationships among trials, diseases, drugs, genes, targets, abstracts, and eligibility criteria through a gated graph transformer architecture, which dynamically learns and weights multi-type relational interactions to capture complex biological and clinical dependencies. By integrating heterogeneous graph representation with transformer-based context modeling, HGGT effectively captures non-linear, multi-scale interactions across biomedical entities, leading to improved predictive performance for trial success. Experimental results demonstrate that the HGGT model achieves strong performance, with the highest PR-AUC, F1 score, and ROC-AUC across three phases. These findings highlight the potential of graph-based deep learning approaches in optimizing clinical trial design and resource allocation, ultimately accelerating the translation of novel therapies into clinical practice.
