Predicting Drug-Target Affinity Based on Recurrent Neural Networks and Graph Convolutional Neural Networks.
Journal:
Combinatorial chemistry & high throughput screening
Published Date:
Jan 1, 2022
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Drug development requires a lot of money and time, and the outcome of the challenge is unknown. So, there is an urgent need for researchers to find a new approach that can reduce costs. Therefore, the identification of drug-target interactions (DTIs) has been a critical step in the early stages of drug discovery. These computational methods aim to narrow the search space for novel DTIs and to elucidate the functional background of drugs. Most of the methods developed so far use binary classification to predict the presence or absence of interactions between the drug and the target. However, it is more informative but also more challenging to predict the strength of the binding between a drug and its target. If the strength is not strong enough, such a DTI may not be useful. Hence, the development of methods to predict drug-target affinity (DTA) is of significant importance Method: We have improved the GraphDTA model from a dual-channel model to a triple-channel model. We interpreted the target/protein sequences as time series and extracted their features using the LSTM network. For the drug, we considered both the molecular structure and the local chemical background, retaining the four variant networks used in GraphDTA to extract the topological features of the drug and capturing the local chemical background of the atoms in the drug by using BiGRU. Thus, we obtained the latent features of the target and two latent features of the drug. The connection of these three feature vectors is then inputted into a 2 layer FC network, and a valuable binding affinity is the output.