Predicting Drug-Target Interactions with Deep-Embedding Learning of Graphs and Sequences.

Journal: The journal of physical chemistry. A
Published Date:

Abstract

Computational approaches for predicting drug-target interactions (DTIs) play an important role in drug discovery since conventional screening experiments are time-consuming and expensive. In this study, we proposed end-to-end representation learning of a graph neural network with an attention mechanism and an attentive bidirectional long short-term memory (BiLSTM) to predict DTIs. For efficient training, we introduced a bidirectional encoder representations from transformers (BERT) pretrained method to extract substructure features from protein sequences and a local breadth-first search (BFS) to learn subgraph information from molecular graphs. Integrating both models, we developed a DTI prediction system. As a result, the proposed method achieved high performances with increases of 2.4% and 9.4% for AUC and recall, respectively, on unbalanced datasets compared with other methods. Extensive experiments showed that our model can relatively screen potential drugs for specific protein. Furthermore, visualizing the attention weights provides biological insight.

Authors

  • Wei Chen
    Department of Urology, Zigong Fourth People's Hospital, Sichuan, China.
  • Guanxing Chen
    Artificial Intelligence Medical Center, School of Intelligent Systems Engineering, Sun Yat-Sen University, Shenzhen, 510275, China.
  • Lu Zhao
    Laboratory of Neuro Imaging, USC Mark and Mary Stevens Neuroimaging and Informatics Institute, Keck School of Medicine of USC, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA, USA.
  • Calvin Yu-Chian Chen
    School of Intelligent Systems Engineering , Sun Yat-sen University , Shenzhen 510275 , China.