DCDB 2.0: a major update of the drug combination database

Insight into Mantle Cell Lymphoma Pathobiology, Diagnosis, and Treatment Using Network-Based and Drug-Repurposing Approaches

Mantle cell lymphoma (MCL) is a rare, incurable, and aggressive B-cell non-Hodgkin lymphoma (NHL). Early MCL diagnosis and treatment is critical and puzzling due to inter/intra-tumoral heterogeneity and limited understanding of the underlying molecular mechanisms. We developed and applied a multifaceted analysis of selected publicly available transcriptomic data of well-defined MCL stages, integrating network-based methods for pathway enrichment analysis, co-expression module alignment, drug repurposing, and prediction of effective drug combinations. We demonstrate the "butterfly effect" emerging from a small set of initially differentially expressed genes, rapidly expanding into numerous deregulated cellular processes, signaling pathways, and core machineries as MCL becomes aggressive. We explore pathogenicity-related signaling circuits by detecting common co-expression modules in MCL stages, pointing out, among others, the role of VEGFA and SPARC proteins in MCL progression and recommend further study of precise drug combinations. Our findings highlight the benefit that can be leveraged by such an approach for better understanding pathobiology and identifying high-priority novel diagnostic and prognostic biomarkers, drug targets, and efficacious combination therapies against MCL that should be further validated for their clinical impact.

Predicting herb-disease associations using network-based measures in human protein interactome

BACKGROUND

Natural herbs are frequently used to treat diseases or to relieve symptoms in many countries. Moreover, as their safety has been proven for a long time, they are considered as main sources of new drug development. However, in many cases, the herbs are still prescribed relying on ancient records and/or traditional practices without scientific evidences. More importantly, the medicinal efficacy of the herbs has to be evaluated in the perspective of MCMT (multi-compound multi-target) effects, but most efforts focus on identifying and analyzing a single compound experimentally. To overcome these hurdles, computational approaches which are based on the scientific evidences and are able to handle the MCMT effects are needed to predict the herb-disease associations.

RESULTS

In this study, we proposed a network-based in silico method to predict the herb-disease associations. To this end, we devised a new network-based measure, WACP (weighted average closest path length), which not only quantifies proximity between herb-related genes and disease-related genes but also considers compound compositions of each herb. As a result, we confirmed that our method successfully predicts the herb-disease associations in the human protein interactome (AUROC = 0.777). In addition, we observed that our method is superior than the other simple network-based proximity measures (e.g. average shortest and closest path length). Additionally, we analyzed the associations between Brassica oleracea var. italica and its known associated diseases more specifically as case studies. Finally, based on the prediction results of the WACP, we suggested novel herb-disease pairs which are expected to have potential relations and their literature evidences.

CONCLUSIONS

This method could be a promising solution to modernize the use of the natural herbs by providing the scientific evidences about the molecular associations between the herb-related genes targeted by multiple compounds and the disease-related genes in the human protein interactome.

Harnessing machine learning to find synergistic combinations for FDA-approved cancer drugs

Combination therapy is a fundamental strategy in cancer chemotherapy. It involves administering two or more anti-cancer agents to increase efficacy and overcome multidrug resistance compared to monotherapy. However, drug combinations can exhibit synergy, additivity, or antagonism. This study presents a machine learning framework to classify and predict cancer drug combinations. The framework utilizes several key steps including data collection and annotation from the O'Neil drug interaction dataset, data preprocessing, stratified splitting into training and test sets, construction and evaluation of classification models to categorize combinations as synergistic, additive, or antagonistic, application of regression models to predict combination sensitivity scores for enhanced predictions compared to prior work, and the last step is examination of drug features and mechanisms of action to understand synergy behaviors for optimal combinations. The models identified combination pairs most likely to synergize against different cancers. Kinase inhibitors combined with mTOR inhibitors, DNA damage-inducing drugs or HDAC inhibitors showed benefit, particularly for ovarian, melanoma, prostate, lung and colorectal carcinomas. Analysis highlighted Gemcitabine, MK-8776 and AZD1775 as frequently synergizing across cancer types. This machine learning framework provides a valuable approach to uncover more effective multi-drug regimens.

Network-Based Methods and Their Applications in Drug Discovery

Drug discovery is time-consuming, expensive, and predominantly follows the "one drug → one target → one disease" paradigm. With the rapid development of systems biology and network pharmacology, a novel drug discovery paradigm, "multidrug → multitarget → multidisease", has emerged. This new holistic paradigm of drug discovery aligns well with the essence of networks, leading to the emergence of network-based methods in the field of drug discovery. In this Perspective, we initially introduce the concept and data sources of networks and highlight classical methodologies employed in network-based methods. Subsequently, we focus on the practical applications of network-based methods across various areas of drug discovery, such as target prediction, virtual screening, prediction of drug therapeutic effects or adverse drug events, and elucidation of molecular mechanisms. In addition, we provide representative web servers for researchers to use network-based methods in specific applications. Finally, we discuss several challenges of network-based methods and the directions for future development. In a word, network-based methods could serve as powerful tools to accelerate drug discovery.

Latent space search based multimodal optimization with personalized edge-network biomarker for multi-purpose early disease prediction

Considering that cancer is resulting from the comutation of several essential genes of individual patients, researchers have begun to focus on identifying personalized edge-network biomarkers (PEBs) using personalized edge-network analysis for clinical practice. However, most of existing methods ignored the optimization of PEBs when multimodal biomarkers exist in multi-purpose early disease prediction (MPEDP). To solve this problem, this study proposes a novel model (MMPDENB-RBM) that combines personalized dynamic edge-network biomarkers (PDENB) theory, multimodal optimization strategy and latent space search scheme to identify biomarkers with different configurations of PDENB modules (i.e. to effectively identify multimodal PDENBs). The application to the three largest cancer omics datasets from The Cancer Genome Atlas database (i.e. breast invasive carcinoma, lung squamous cell carcinoma and lung adenocarcinoma) showed that the MMPDENB-RBM model could more effectively predict critical cancer state compared with other advanced methods. And, our model had better convergence, diversity and multimodal property as well as effective optimization ability compared with the other state-of-art methods. Particularly, multimodal PDENBs identified were more enriched with different functional biomarkers simultaneously, such as tissue-specific synthetic lethality edge-biomarkers including cancer driver genes and disease marker genes. Importantly, as our aim, these multimodal biomarkers can perform diverse biological and biomedical significances for drug target screen, survival risk assessment and novel biomedical sight as the expected multi-purpose of personalized early disease prediction. In summary, the present study provides multimodal property of PDENBs, especially the therapeutic biomarkers with more biological significances, which can help with MPEDP of individual cancer patients.

A model-agnostic framework to enhance knowledge graph-based drug combination prediction with drug-drug interaction data and supervised contrastive learning

Combination therapies have brought significant advancements to the treatment of various diseases in the medical field. However, searching for effective drug combinations remains a major challenge due to the vast number of possible combinations. Biomedical knowledge graph (KG)-based methods have shown potential in predicting effective combinations for wide spectrum of diseases, but the lack of credible negative samples has limited the prediction performance of machine learning models. To address this issue, we propose a novel model-agnostic framework that leverages existing drug-drug interaction (DDI) data as a reliable negative dataset and employs supervised contrastive learning (SCL) to transform drug embedding vectors to be more suitable for drug combination prediction. We conducted extensive experiments using various network embedding algorithms, including random walk and graph neural networks, on a biomedical KG. Our framework significantly improved performance metrics compared to the baseline framework. We also provide embedding space visualizations and case studies that demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach. This work highlights the potential of using DDI data and SCL in finding tighter decision boundaries for predicting effective drug combinations.

Predicting cell line-specific synergistic drug combinations through a relational graph convolutional network with attention mechanism

Identifying synergistic drug combinations (SDCs) is a great challenge due to the combinatorial complexity and the fact that SDC is cell line specific. The existing computational methods either did not consider the cell line specificity of SDC, or did not perform well by building model for each cell line independently. In this paper, we present a novel encoder-decoder network named SDCNet for predicting cell line-specific SDCs. SDCNet learns common patterns across different cell lines as well as cell line-specific features in one model for drug combinations. This is realized by considering the SDC graphs of different cell lines as a relational graph, and constructing a relational graph convolutional network (R-GCN) as the encoder to learn and fuse the deep representations of drugs for different cell lines. An attention mechanism is devised to integrate the drug features from different layers of the R-GCN according to their relative importance so that representation learning is further enhanced. The common patterns are exploited through partial parameter sharing in cell line-specific decoders, which not only reconstruct the known SDCs but also predict new ones for each cell line. Experiments on various datasets demonstrate that SDCNet is superior to state-of-the-art methods and is also robust when generalized to new cell lines that are different from the training ones. Finally, the case study again confirms the effectiveness of our method in predicting novel reliable cell line-specific SDCs.

Application of Computational Biology and Artificial Intelligence in Drug Design

Traditional drug design requires a great amount of research time and developmental expense. Booming computational approaches, including computational biology, computer-aided drug design, and artificial intelligence, have the potential to expedite the efficiency of drug discovery by minimizing the time and financial cost. In recent years, computational approaches are being widely used to improve the efficacy and effectiveness of drug discovery and pipeline, leading to the approval of plenty of new drugs for marketing. The present review emphasizes on the applications of these indispensable computational approaches in aiding target identification, lead discovery, and lead optimization. Some challenges of using these approaches for drug design are also discussed. Moreover, we propose a methodology for integrating various computational techniques into new drug discovery and design.

Multidrug representation learning based on pretraining model and molecular graph for drug interaction and combination prediction

MOTIVATION

Approaches for the diagnosis and treatment of diseases often adopt the multidrug therapy method because it can increase the efficacy or reduce the toxic side effects of drugs. Using different drugs simultaneously may trigger unexpected pharmacological effects. Therefore, efficient identification of drug interactions is essential for the treatment of complex diseases. Currently proposed calculation methods are often limited by the collection of redundant drug features, a small amount of labeled data and low model generalization capabilities. Meanwhile, there is also a lack of unique methods for multidrug representation learning, which makes it more difficult to take full advantage of the originally scarce data.

RESULTS

Inspired by graph models and pretraining models, we integrated a large amount of unlabeled drug molecular graph information and target information, then designed a pretraining framework, MGP-DR (Molecular Graph Pretraining for Drug Representation), specifically for drug pair representation learning. The model uses self-supervised learning strategies to mine the contextual information within and between drug molecules to predict drug-drug interactions and drug combinations. The results achieved promising performance across multiple metrics compared with other state-of-the-art methods. Our MGP-DR model can be used to provide a reliable candidate set for the combined use of multiple drugs.

AVAILABILITY AND IMPLEMENTATION

Code of the model, datasets and results can be downloaded from GitHub (https://github.com/LiangYu-Xidian/MGP-DR).

SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION

Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.

CDCDB: A large and continuously updated drug combination database

In recent years, due to the complementary action of drug combinations over mono-therapy, the multiple-drugs for multiple-targets paradigm has received increased attention to treat bacterial infections and complex diseases. Although new drug combinations screening has benefited from experimental tests like automated high throughput screening, it is limited due to the large number of possible drug combinations. The task of drug combination screening can be streamlined through computational methods and models. Such models require up-to-date databases; however, existing databases are static and consist of the data collected at the time of their creation. This paper introduces the Continuous Drug Combination Database (CDCDB), a continuously updated drug combination database. The CDCDB includes over 40,795 drug combinations, of which 17,107 are unique combinations consisting of more than 4,129 individual drugs, curated from ClinicalTrials.gov, the FDA Orange Book^®, and patents. To create CDCDB, we use various methods, including natural language processing techniques, to improve the process of drug combination discovery, ensuring that our database can be used for drug synergy prediction. Website: https://icc.ise.bgu.ac.il/medical_ai/CDCDB/.

Measurement(s)	drug combination effect modeling • drug combination effect modeling
Technology Type(s)	Text mining • Clinical Trials Informatics System
Factor Type(s)	Medicine
Sample Characteristic - Organism	Homo sapiens

Integrated Network Pharmacology Approach for Drug Combination Discovery: A Multi-Cancer Case Study

Despite remarkable efforts of computational and predictive pharmacology to improve therapeutic strategies for complex diseases, only in a few cases have the predictions been eventually employed in the clinics. One of the reasons behind this drawback is that current predictive approaches are based only on the integration of molecular perturbation of a certain disease with drug sensitivity signatures, neglecting intrinsic properties of the drugs. Here we integrate mechanistic and chemocentric approaches to drug repositioning by developing an innovative network pharmacology strategy. We developed a multilayer network-based computational framework integrating perturbational signatures of the disease as well as intrinsic characteristics of the drugs, such as their mechanism of action and chemical structure. We present five case studies carried out on public data from The Cancer Genome Atlas, including invasive breast cancer, colon adenocarcinoma, lung squamous cell carcinoma, hepatocellular carcinoma and prostate adenocarcinoma. Our results highlight paclitaxel as a suitable drug for combination therapy for many of the considered cancer types. In addition, several non-cancer-related genes representing unusual drug targets were identified as potential candidates for pharmacological treatment of cancer.

A review of machine learning approaches for drug synergy prediction in cancer

Combinational pharmacotherapy with the synergistic/additive effect is a powerful treatment strategy for complex diseases such as malignancies. Identifying synergistic combinations with various compounds and structures requires testing a large number of compound combinations. However, in practice, examining different compounds by in vivo and in vitro approaches is costly, infeasible and challenging. In the last decades, significant success has been achieved by expanding computational methods in different pharmacological and bioinformatics domains. As promising tools, computational approaches such as machine learning algorithms (MLAs) are used for prioritizing combinational pharmacotherapies. This review aims to provide the models developed to predict synergistic drug combinations in cancer by MLAs with various information, including gene expression, protein-protein interactions, metabolite interactions, pathways and pharmaceutical information such as chemical structure, molecular descriptor and drug-target interactions.

NPCDR: natural product-based drug combination and its disease-specific molecular regulation

Natural product (NP) has a long history in promoting modern drug discovery, which has derived or inspired a large number of currently prescribed drugs. Recently, the NPs have emerged as the ideal candidates to combine with other therapeutic strategies to deal with the persistent challenge of conventional therapy, and the molecular regulation mechanism underlying these combinations is crucial for the related communities. Thus, it is urgently demanded to comprehensively provide the disease-specific molecular regulation data for various NP-based drug combinations. However, no database has been developed yet to describe such valuable information. In this study, a newly developed database entitled ‘Natural Product-based Drug Combination and Its Disease-specific Molecular Regulation (NPCDR)’ was thus introduced. This database was unique in (a) providing the comprehensive information of NP-based drug combinations & describing their clinically or experimentally validated therapeutic effect, (b) giving the disease-specific molecular regulation data for a number of NP-based drug combinations, (c) fully referencing all NPs, drugs, regulated molecules/pathways by cross-linking them to the available databases describing their biological or pharmaceutical characteristics. Therefore, NPCDR is expected to have great implications for the future practice of network pharmacology, medical biochemistry, drug design, and medicinal chemistry. This database is now freely accessible without any login requirement at both official (https://idrblab.org/npcdr/) and mirror (http://npcdr.idrblab.net/) sites.

Heterogeneous information network and its application to human health and disease

The molecular components with the functional interdependencies in human cell form complicated biological network. Diseases are mostly caused by the perturbations of the composite of the interaction multi-biomolecules, rather than an abnormality of a single biomolecule. Furthermore, new biological functions and processes could be revealed by discovering novel biological entity relationships. Hence, more and more biologists focus on studying the complex biological system instead of the individual biological components. The emergence of heterogeneous information network (HIN) offers a promising way to systematically explore complicated and heterogeneous relationships between various molecules for apparently distinct phenotypes. In this review, we first present the basic definition of HIN and the biological system considered as a complex HIN. Then, we discuss the topological properties of HIN and how these can be applied to detect network motif and functional module. Afterwards, methodologies of discovering relationships between disease and biomolecule are presented. Useful insights on how HIN aids in drug development and explores human interactome are provided. Finally, we analyze the challenges and opportunities for uncovering combinatorial patterns among pharmacogenomics and cell-type detection based on single-cell genomic data.

Machine learning methods, databases and tools for drug combination prediction

Combination therapy has shown an obvious efficacy on complex diseases and can greatly reduce the development of drug resistance. However, even with high-throughput screens, experimental methods are insufficient to explore novel drug combinations. In order to reduce the search space of drug combinations, there is an urgent need to develop more efficient computational methods to predict novel drug combinations. In recent decades, more and more machine learning (ML) algorithms have been applied to improve the predictive performance. The object of this study is to introduce and discuss the recent applications of ML methods and the widely used databases in drug combination prediction. In this study, we first describe the concept and controversy of synergism between drug combinations. Then, we investigate various publicly available data resources and tools for prediction tasks. Next, ML methods including classic ML and deep learning methods applied in drug combination prediction are introduced. Finally, we summarize the challenges to ML methods in prediction tasks and provide a discussion on future work.

The optimization of combinatorial drug therapies: Strategies and laboratorial platforms

Designing optimal combinatorial drug therapies is challenging, because the drug interactions depend not only on the drugs involved, but also on their doses. With recent advances, combinatorial drug therapy is closer than ever to clinical application. Herein, we summarize approaches and advances over the past decade for identifying and optimizing drug combination therapies, with innovations across research fields, covering physical laboratory platforms for combination screening to computational models and algorithms designed for synergism prediction and optimization. By comparing different types of approach, we detail a three-step workflow that could maximize the overall optimization efficiency, thus enabling the application of personalized optimization of combinatorial drug therapy.

Systems Pharmacology-Based Precision Therapy and Drug Combination Discovery for Breast Cancer

Breast cancer (BC) is a common disease and one of the main causes of death in females worldwide. In the omics era, researchers have used various high-throughput sequencing technologies to accumulate massive amounts of biomedical data and reveal an increasing number of disease-related mutations/genes. It is a major challenge to use these data effectively to find drugs that may protect human health. In this study, we combined the GeneRank algorithm and gene dependency network to propose a precision drug discovery strategy that can recommend drugs for individuals and screen existing drugs that could be used to treat different BC subtypes. We used this strategy to screen four BC subtype-specific drug combinations and verified the potential activity of combining gefitinib and irinotecan in triple-negative breast cancer (TNBC) through in vivo and in vitro experiments. The results of cell and animal experiments demonstrated that the combination of gefitinib and irinotecan can significantly inhibit the growth of TNBC tumour cells. The results also demonstrated that this systems pharmacology-based precision drug discovery strategy effectively identified important disease-related genes in individuals and special groups, which supports its efficiency, high reliability, and practical application value in drug discovery.

Machine learning in the prediction of cancer therapy

Resistance to therapy remains a major cause of cancer treatment failures, resulting in many cancer-related deaths. Resistance can occur at any time during the treatment, even at the beginning. The current treatment plan is dependent mainly on cancer subtypes and the presence of genetic mutations. Evidently, the presence of a genetic mutation does not always predict the therapeutic response and can vary for different cancer subtypes. Therefore, there is an unmet need for predictive models to match a cancer patient with a specific drug or drug combination. Recent advancements in predictive models using artificial intelligence have shown great promise in preclinical settings. However, despite massive improvements in computational power, building clinically useable models remains challenging due to a lack of clinically meaningful pharmacogenomic data. In this review, we provide an overview of recent advancements in therapeutic response prediction using machine learning, which is the most widely used branch of artificial intelligence. We describe the basics of machine learning algorithms, illustrate their use, and highlight the current challenges in therapy response prediction for clinical practice.

Inferring Synergistic Drug Combinations Based on Symmetric Meta-Path in a Novel Heterogeneous Network

Combinatorial drug therapy is a promising way for treating cancers, which can reduce drug side effects and improve drug efficacy. However, due to the large-scale combinatorial space, it is difficult to quickly and effectively identify novel synergistic drug combinations for further implementing combinatorial drug therapy. The computational method of fusing multi-source knowledge is a time- and cost-efficient strategy to infer synergistic drug combinations for testing. However, for the existing computational methods of inferring synergistic drug combinations, it still remains a challenging to effectively combine multi-source information to achieve the desired results. Hence, in this study, we developed a novel Inference method of Synergistic Drug Combinations based on Symmetric Meta-Path (ISDCSMP), which can systematically and accurately prioritize synergistic drug combinations in a novel drug-target heterogeneous network integrating multi-source information. In the experiment, ISDCSMP outperformed the state-of-the-art methods in terms of AUC and precision on the benchmark dataset in five-fold cross validation. Moreover, we further illustrated performances of different ways for obtaining the combination coefficients, and analyzed the influences of the maximum meta-path length. The performances of various single meta-paths were described in five-fold cross validation. Finally, we confirmed the practical usefulness of ISDCSMP with the predicted novel synergistic drug combinations. The source code of ISDCSMP is available at https://github.com/KDDing/ISDCSMP.

Using response surface models to analyze drug combinations

Quantitative evaluation of how drugs combine to elicit a biological response is crucial for drug development. Evaluations of drug combinations are often performed using index-based methods, which are known to be biased and unstable. We examine how these methods can produce misleadingly structured patterns of bias, leading to erroneous judgments of synergy or antagonism. By contrast, response surface models are less prone to these defects and can be applied to a wide range of data that have appeared in recent literature, including the measurement of combination therapeutic windows and the analysis of discrete experimental measures, three-way drug combinations, and atypical response behaviors.

Network controllability-based algorithm to target personalized driver genes for discovering combinatorial drugs of individual patients

Multiple driver genes in individual patient samples may cause resistance to individual drugs in precision medicine. However, current computational methods have not studied how to fill the gap between personalized driver gene identification and combinatorial drug discovery for individual patients. Here, we developed a novel structural network controllability-based personalized driver genes and combinatorial drug identification algorithm (CPGD), aiming to identify combinatorial drugs for an individual patient by targeting personalized driver genes from network controllability perspective. On two benchmark disease datasets (i.e. breast cancer and lung cancer datasets), performance of CPGD is superior to that of other state-of-the-art driver gene-focus methods in terms of discovery rate among prior-known clinical efficacious combinatorial drugs. Especially on breast cancer dataset, CPGD evaluated synergistic effect of pairwise drug combinations by measuring synergistic effect of their corresponding personalized driver gene modules, which are affected by a given targeting personalized driver gene set of drugs. The results showed that CPGD performs better than existing synergistic combinatorial strategies in identifying clinical efficacious paired combinatorial drugs. Furthermore, CPGD enhanced cancer subtyping by computationally providing personalized side effect signatures for individual patients. In addition, CPGD identified 90 drug combinations candidates from SARS-COV2 dataset as potential drug repurposing candidates for recently spreading COVID-19.

Synergistic Drug Combination Prediction by Integrating Multiomics Data in Deep Learning Models

Intrinsic and acquired drug resistance is a major challenge in cancer therapy. Synergistic drug combinations could help to overcome drug resistance. However, the number of possible drug combinations is enormous, and it is infeasible to experimentally screen all drug combinations with limited resources. Therefore, computational models to predict and prioritize effective drug combinations are important for combination therapy discovery. Compared with existing models, we propose a novel deep learning model, AuDNNsynergy, to predict the synergy of pairwise drug combinations by integrating multiomics data. Specifically, three autoencoders are trained using the gene expression, copy number, and genetic mutation data of tumor samples from The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA). Then the gene expression, copy number, and mutation of individual cancer cell lines are coded using the three trained autoencoders. The physicochemical features of individual drugs and the encoded omics data of individual cancer cell lines are used as the input features of a deep neural network that predicts the synergy score of given pairwise drug combinations against the specific cancer cell lines. The comparison results showed the proposed AuDNNsynergy model outperforms, specifically in terms of rank correlation metric, four state-of-the-art approaches, namely, DeepSynergy, Gradient Boosting Machines, Random Forests, and Elastic Nets.

An Analytical Review of Computational Drug Repurposing

Drug repurposing is a vital function in pharmaceutical fields and has gained popularity in recent years in both the pharmaceutical industry and research community. It refers to the process of discovering new uses and indications for existing or failed drugs. It is cost-effective and reliable in contrast to experimental drug discovery, which is a costly, time-consuming, and risky process and limited to a relatively small number of targets. Accordingly, a plethora of computational methodologies have been propounded to repurpose drugs on a large scale by utilizing available high throughput data. The available literature, however, lacks a contemporary and comprehensive analysis of the current computational drug repurposing methodologies. In this paper, we presented a systematic analysis of computational drug repurposing which consists of three main sections: Initially, we categorize the computational drug repurposing methods based on their technical approach and artificial intelligence perspective and discuss the strengths and weaknesses of various methods. Secondly, some general criteria are recommended to analyze our proposed categorization. In the third and final section, a qualitative comparison is made between each approach which is a guide to understanding their preference to one another. Further, this systematic analysis can help in the efficient selection and improvement of drug repurposing techniques based on the nature of computational methods implemented on biological resources.

An In Silico Method for Predicting Drug Synergy Based on Multitask Learning

To make better use of all kinds of knowledge to predict drug synergy, it is crucial to successfully establish a drug synergy prediction model and leverage the reconstruction of sparse known drug targets. Therefore, we present an in silico method that predicts the synergy scores of drug pairs based on multitask learning (DSML) that could fuse drug targets, protein-protein interactions, anatomical therapeutic chemical codes, a priori knowledge of drug combinations. To simultaneously reconstruct drug-target protein interactions and synergistic drug combinations, DSML benefits indirectly from the associations with relation through proteins. In cross-validation experiments, DSML improved the ability to predict drug synergy. Moreover, the reconstruction of drug-target interactions and the incorporation of multisource knowledge significantly improved drug combination predictions by a large margin. The potential drug combinations predicted by DSML demonstrate its ability to predict drug synergy.

Survey of Similarity-Based Prediction of Drug-Protein Interactions

Therapeutic activity of a significant majority of drugs is determined by their interactions with proteins. Databases of drug-protein interactions (DPIs) primarily focus on the therapeutic protein targets while the knowledge of the off-targets is fragmented and partial. One way to bridge this knowledge gap is to employ computational methods to predict protein targets for a given drug molecule, or interacting drugs for given protein targets. We survey a comprehensive set of 35 methods that were published in high-impact venues and that predict DPIs based on similarity between drugs and similarity between protein targets. We analyze the internal databases of known PDIs that these methods utilize to compute similarities, and investigate how they are linked to the 12 publicly available source databases. We discuss contents, impact and relationships between these internal and source databases, and well as the timeline of their releases and publications. The 35 predictors exploit and often combine three types of similarities that consider drug structures, drug profiles, and target sequences. We review the predictive architectures of these methods, their impact, and we explain how their internal DPIs databases are linked to the source databases. We also include a detailed timeline of the development of these predictors and discuss the underlying limitations of the current resources and predictive tools. Finally, we provide several recommendations concerning the future development of the related databases and methods.

Combining kinase inhibitors for optimally co-targeting cancer and drug escape by exploitation of drug target promiscuities

Cancers resist targeted therapeutics by drug-escape signaling. Multitarget drugs co-targeting cancer and drug-escape mediators (DEMs) are clinically advantageous. DEM coverage may be expanded by drug combinations. This work evaluated to what extent the kinase DEMs (KDEMs) can be optimally co-targeted by drug combinations based on target promiscuities of individual drugs. We focused on 41 approved and 28 clinical trial small molecule kinase inhibitor drugs with available experimental kinome and clinical pharmacokinetic data. From the kinome inhibitory profiles of these drugs, drug combinations were assembled for optimally co-targeting an established cancer target (EGFR, HER2, ABL1, or MEK1) and 9-16 target-associated KDEMs at comparable potency levels as that against the cancer target. Each set of two-, three-, and four-drug combinations co-target 36-71%, 44-89%, 50-88%, and 27-55% KDEMs of EGFR, HER2, ABL1, and MEK1, respectively, compared with the 36, 33, 38, and 18% KDEMs maximally co-targeted by an existing drug or drug combination approved or clinically tested for the respective cancer. Some co-targeted KDEMs are not covered by any existing drug or drug combination. Our work suggested that novel drug combinations may be constructed for optimally co-targeting cancer and drug escape by the exploitation of drug target promiscuities.

A Machine Learning Method for Drug Combination Prediction

Drug combination is now a hot research topic in the pharmaceutical industry, but experiment-based methodologies are extremely costly in time and money. Many computational methods have been proposed to address these problems by starting from existing drug combinations. However, in most cases, only molecular structure information is included, which covers too limited a set of drug characteristics to efficiently screen drug combinations. Here, we integrated similarity-based multifeature drug data to improve the prediction accuracy by using the neighbor recommender method combined with ensemble learning algorithms. By conducting feature assessment analysis, we selected the most useful drug features and achieved 0.964 AUC in the ensemble models. The comparison results showed that the ensemble models outperform traditional machine learning algorithms such as support vector machine (SVM), naïve Bayes (NB), and logistic regression (GLM). Furthermore, we predicted 7 candidate drug combinations for a specific drug, paclitaxel, and successfully verified that the two of the predicted combinations have promising effects.

Evaluating the consistency of large-scale pharmacogenomic studies

Recent years have seen an increase in the availability of pharmacogenomic databases such as Genomics of Drug Sensitivity in Cancer (GDSC) and Cancer Cell Line Encyclopedia (CCLE) that provide genomic and functional characterization information for multiple cell lines. Studies have alluded to the fact that specific characterizations may be inconsistent between different databases. Analysis of the potential discrepancies in the different databases is highly significant, as these sources are frequently used to analyze and validate methodologies for personalized cancer therapies. In this article, we review the recent developments in investigating the correspondence between different pharmacogenomics databases and discuss the potential factors that require attention when incorporating these sources in any modeling analysis. Furthermore, we explored the consistency among these databases using copulas that can capture nonlinear dependencies between two sets of data.

Predicting drug synergy for precision medicine using network biology and machine learning

Identification of effective drug combinations for patients is an expensive and time-consuming procedure, especially for in vitro experiments. To accelerate the synergistic drug discovery process, we present a new classification model to identify more effective anti-cancer drug pairs using in silico network biology approach. Based on the hypotheses that the drug synergy comes from the collective effects on the biological network, therefore, we developed six network biology features, including overlap and distance of drug perturbation network, that were derived by using individual drug-perturbed transcriptome profiles and the relevant biological network analysis. Using publicly available drug synergy databases and three machine-learning (ML) methods, the model was trained to discriminate the positive (synergistic) and negative (nonsynergistic) drug combinations. The proposed models were evaluated on the test cases to predict the most promising network biology feature, which is the network degree activity, i.e. the synergistic effect between drug pairs is mainly accounted by the complementary signaling pathways or molecular networks from two drugs.

Machine learning approaches to drug response prediction: challenges and recent progress

Cancer is a leading cause of death worldwide. Identifying the best treatment using computational models to personalize drug response prediction holds great promise to improve patient's chances of successful recovery. Unfortunately, the computational task of predicting drug response is very challenging, partially due to the limitations of the available data and partially due to algorithmic shortcomings. The recent advances in deep learning may open a new chapter in the search for computational drug response prediction models and ultimately result in more accurate tools for therapy response. This review provides an overview of the computational challenges and advances in drug response prediction, and focuses on comparing the machine learning techniques to be of utmost practical use for clinicians and machine learning non-experts. The incorporation of new data modalities such as single-cell profiling, along with techniques that rapidly find effective drug combinations will likely be instrumental in improving cancer care.

DrugCombDB: a comprehensive database of drug combinations toward the discovery of combinatorial therapy

Drug combinations have demonstrated high efficacy and low adverse side effects compared to single drug administration in cancer therapies and thus have drawn intensive attention from researchers and pharmaceutical enterprises. Due to the rapid development of high-throughput screening (HTS), the number of drug combination datasets available has increased tremendously in recent years. Therefore, there is an urgent need for a comprehensive database that is crucial to both experimental and computational screening of synergistic drug combinations. In this paper, we present DrugCombDB, a comprehensive database devoted to the curation of drug combinations from various data sources: (i) HTS assays of drug combinations; (ii) manual curations from the literature; and (iii) FDA Orange Book and external databases. Specifically, DrugCombDB includes 448 555 drug combinations derived from HTS assays, covering 2887 unique drugs and 124 human cancer cell lines. In particular, DrugCombDB has more than 6000 000 quantitative dose responses from which we computed multiple synergy scores to determine the overall synergistic or antagonistic effects of drug combinations. In addition to the combinations extracted from existing databases, we manually curated 457 drug combinations from thousands of PubMed publications. To benefit the further experimental validation and development of computational models, multiple datasets that are ready to train prediction models for classification and regression analysis were constructed and other significant related data were gathered. A website with a user-friendly graphical visualization has been developed for users to access the wealth of data and download prebuilt datasets. Our database is available at http://drugcombdb.denglab.org/.

Reveal the Regulation Patterns of Prognosis-Related miRNAs and lncRNAs Across Solid Tumors in the Cancer Genome Atlas

BACKGROUND

The dysregulation of non-coding RNAs (ncRNAs) such as miRNAs and lncRNAs are associated with the pathogenesis and progression in multiple cancers including solid tumors. Comprehensive investigations of prognosis-related ncRNA markers could promote the development of therapeutic strategies for solid tumors, but rarely reported.

METHODS

By taking advantage of The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA), pan-cancer prognosis analysis (PCPA) models were firstly constructed based on miRNA and lncRNA expression profiles of 8,450 samples in 19 solid tumors. Further, the co-occurrence and exclusivity among ncRNA markers were systematically analyzed for different cancers.

RESULTS

In identified ncRNA makers, 71% of the miRNA markers were shared in multiple cancers, whereas 96% of the lncRNA markers were cancer-specific. Moreover, to analyze the regulation patterns of prognosis-related ncRNAs at the pan-cancer level, miRNA markers were further annotated into eight carcinogenic pathways. Results represented that approximately 86% of these miRNA markers could regulate the PI3K-Akt signaling pathway, while only 48% for the Notch signaling pathway. Finally, among 126 common genes that participated in eight carcinogenic pathways, BCL2, CSNK2A1, EGFR, PDGFRA, and VEGFA were proposed as potential drug targets for multiple cancers.

CONCLUSION

The prognosis analysis and regulation characteristics of ncRNAs presented in this study may help to facilitate the discovery of anti-cancer drugs for multiple solid tumors.

Incorporating Multisource Knowledge To Predict Drug Synergy Based on Graph Co-regularization

Drug combinations may reduce toxicity and increase therapeutic efficacy, offering a promising strategy to conquer multiple complex diseases. However, due to large-scale combinatorial space, it remains challenging to identify effective combinations. Although many computational methods have focused on predicting drug synergy to reduce combinatorial space, they fail to effectively consider multiple sources of important knowledge. Thus, it is necessary to propose a computational method that can exploit useful information to predict drug synergy. Here, we developed a computational method to predict drug synergy based on graph co-regularization, named DSGCR. By incorporating drug-target network patterns, pharmacological patterns, and prior knowledge of drug combinations, DSGCR performs predictions of synergistic drug combinations. Compared to several existing methods, DSGCR achieves superior performance in predicting drug synergy in terms of various metrics via cross-validation. Additionally, we analyzed the importance of various sources of drug knowledge concerning three DSGCR's scenarios. Finally, the potential of DSGCR to score drug synergy was confirmed by three predicted synergistic drug combinations.

Predicting effective drug combinations using gradient tree boosting based on features extracted from drug-protein heterogeneous network

Background

Although targeted drugs have contributed to impressive advances in the treatment of cancer patients, their clinical benefits on tumor therapies are greatly limited due to intrinsic and acquired resistance of cancer cells against such drugs. Drug combinations synergistically interfere with protein networks to inhibit the activity level of carcinogenic genes more effectively, and therefore play an increasingly important role in the treatment of complex disease.

Results

In this paper, we combined the drug similarity network, protein similarity network and known drug-protein associations into a drug-protein heterogenous network. Next, we ran random walk with restart (RWR) on the heterogenous network using the combinatorial drug targets as the initial probability, and obtained the converged probability distribution as the feature vector of each drug combination. Taking these feature vectors as input, we trained a gradient tree boosting (GTB) classifier to predict new drug combinations. We conducted performance evaluation on the widely used drug combination data set derived from the DCDB database. The experimental results show that our method outperforms seven typical classifiers and traditional boosting algorithms.

Conclusions

The heterogeneous network-derived features introduced in our method are more informative and enriching compared to the primary ontology features, which results in better performance. In addition, from the perspective of network pharmacology, our method effectively exploits the topological attributes and interactions of drug targets in the overall biological network, which proves to be a systematic and reliable approach for drug discovery.

Synergistic Chemotherapy Drug Response Is a Genetic Trait in Lymphoblastoid Cell Lines

Lymphoblastoid cell lines (LCLs) are a highly successful model for evaluating the genetic etiology of cancer drug response, but applications using this model have typically focused on single drugs. Combination therapy is quite common in modern chemotherapy treatment since drugs often work synergistically, and it is an important progression in the use of the LCL model to expand work for drug combinations. In the present work, we demonstrate that synergy occurs and can be quantified in LCLs across a range of clinically important drug combinations. Lymphoblastoid cell lines have been commonly employed in association mapping in cancer pharmacogenomics, but it is so far untested as to whether synergistic effects have a genetic etiology. Here we use cell lines from extended pedigrees to demonstrate that there is a substantial heritable component to synergistic drug response. Additionally, we perform linkage mapping in these pedigrees to identify putative regions linked to this important phenotype. This demonstration supports the premise of expanding the use of the LCL model to perform association mapping for combination therapies.

Recent applications of deep learning and machine intelligence on in silico drug discovery: methods, tools and databases

The identification of interactions between drugs/compounds and their targets is crucial for the development of new drugs. In vitro screening experiments (i.e. bioassays) are frequently used for this purpose; however, experimental approaches are insufficient to explore novel drug-target interactions, mainly because of feasibility problems, as they are labour intensive, costly and time consuming. A computational field known as 'virtual screening' (VS) has emerged in the past decades to aid experimental drug discovery studies by statistically estimating unknown bio-interactions between compounds and biological targets. These methods use the physico-chemical and structural properties of compounds and/or target proteins along with the experimentally verified bio-interaction information to generate predictive models. Lately, sophisticated machine learning techniques are applied in VS to elevate the predictive performance. The objective of this study is to examine and discuss the recent applications of machine learning techniques in VS, including deep learning, which became highly popular after giving rise to epochal developments in the fields of computer vision and natural language processing. The past 3 years have witnessed an unprecedented amount of research studies considering the application of deep learning in biomedicine, including computational drug discovery. In this review, we first describe the main instruments of VS methods, including compound and protein features (i.e. representations and descriptors), frequently used libraries and toolkits for VS, bioactivity databases and gold-standard data sets for system training and benchmarking. We subsequently review recent VS studies with a strong emphasis on deep learning applications. Finally, we discuss the present state of the field, including the current challenges and suggest future directions. We believe that this survey will provide insight to the researchers working in the field of computational drug discovery in terms of comprehending and developing novel bio-prediction methods.

Alternative splicing in human cancer cells is modulated by the amiloride derivative 3,5-diamino-6-chloro-N-(N-(2,6-dichlorobenzoyl)carbamimidoyl)pyrazine-2-carboxide

Alternative splicing (AS) is a process that enables the generation of multiple protein isoforms with different biological properties from a single mRNA. Cancer cells often use the maneuverability conferred by AS to produce proteins that contribute to growth and survival. In our previous studies, we identified that amiloride modulates AS in cancer cells. However, the effective concentration of amiloride required to modulate AS is too high for use in cancer treatment. In this study, we used computational algorithms to screen potential amiloride derivatives for their ability to regulate AS in cancer cells. We found that 3,5-diamino-6-chloro-N-(N-(2,6-dichlorobenzoyl)carbamimidoyl)pyrazine-2-carboxamide (BS008) can regulate AS of apoptotic gene transcripts, including HIPK3, SMAC, and BCL-X, at a lower concentration than amiloride. This splicing regulation involved various splicing factors, and it was accompanied by a change in the phosphorylation state of serine/arginine-rich proteins (SR proteins). RNA sequencing was performed to reveal that AS of many other apoptotic gene transcripts, such as AATF, ATM, AIFM1, NFKB1, and API5, was also modulated by BS008. In vivo experiments further indicated that treatment of tumor-bearing mice with BS008 resulted in a marked decrease in tumor size. BS008 also had inhibitory effects in vitro, either alone or in a synergistic combination with the cytotoxic chemotherapeutic agents sorafenib and nilotinib. BS008 enabled sorafenib dose reduction without compromising antitumor activity. These findings suggest that BS008 may possess therapeutic potential for cancer treatment.

Artificial Intelligence in Drug Treatment

The most common applications of artificial intelligence (AI) in drug treatment have to do with matching patients to their optimal drug or combination of drugs, predicting drug-target or drug-drug interactions, and optimizing treatment protocols. This review outlines some of the recently developed AI methods aiding the drug treatment and administration process. Selection of the best drug(s) for a patient typically requires the integration of patient data, such as genetics or proteomics, with drug data, like compound chemical descriptors, to score the therapeutic efficacy of drugs. The prediction of drug interactions often relies on similarity metrics, assuming that drugs with similar structures or targets will have comparable behavior or may interfere with each other. Optimizing the dosage schedule for administration of drugs is performed using mathematical models to interpret pharmacokinetic and pharmacodynamic data. The recently developed and powerful models for each of these tasks are addressed, explained, and analyzed here.

Five-Feature Model for Developing the Classifier for Synergistic vs. Antagonistic Drug Combinations Built by XGBoost

Combinatorial drug therapy can improve the therapeutic effect and reduce the corresponding adverse events. In silico strategies to classify synergistic vs. antagonistic drug pairs is more efficient than experimental strategies. However, most of the developed methods have been applied only to cancer therapies. In this study, we introduce a novel method, XGBoost, based on five features of drugs and biomolecular networks of their targets, to classify synergistic vs. antagonistic drug combinations from different drug categories. We found that XGBoost outperformed other classifiers in both stratified fivefold cross-validation (CV) and independent validation. For example, XGBoost achieved higher predictive accuracy than other models (0.86, 0.78, 0.78, and 0.83 for XGBoost, logistic regression, naïve Bayesian, and random forest, respectively) for an independent validation set. We also found that the five-feature XGBoost model is much more effective at predicting combinatorial therapies that have synergistic effects than those with antagonistic effects. The five-feature XGBoost model was also validated on TCGA data with accuracy of 0.79 among the 61 tested drug pairs, which is comparable to that of DeepSynergy. Among the 14 main anatomical/pharmacological groups classified according to WHO Anatomic Therapeutic Class, for drugs belonging to five groups, their prediction accuracy was significantly increased (odds ratio < 1) or reduced (odds ratio > 1) (Fisher's exact test, p < 0.05). This study concludes that our five-feature XGBoost model has significant benefits for classifying synergistic vs. antagonistic drug combinations.

Advances in computational approaches in identifying synergistic drug combinations

Accumulated empirical clinical experience, supported by animal or cell line models, has initiated efforts of predicting synergistic combinatorial drugs with more-than-additive effect compared with the sum of the individual agents. Aiming to construct better computational models, this review started from the latest updated data resources of combinatorial drugs, then summarized the reported mechanism of the known synergistic combinations from aspects of drug molecular and pharmacological patterns, target network properties and compound functional annotation. Based on above, we focused on the main in silico strategies recently published, covering methods of molecular modeling, mathematical simulation, optimization of combinatorial targets and pattern-based statistical/learning model. Future thoughts are also discussed related to the role of natural compounds, drug combination with immunotherapy and management of adverse effects. Overall, with particular emphasis on mechanism of action of drug synergy, this review may serve as a rapid reference to design improved models for combinational drugs.

Synergy and antagonism in natural product extracts: when 1 + 1 does not equal 2

Covering: 2000 to 2019 According to a 2012 survey from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, approximately 18% of the U.S. population uses natural products (including plant-based or botanical preparations) for treatment or prevention of disease. The use of plant-based medicines is even more prevalent in developing countries, where for many they constitute the primary health care modality. Proponents of the medicinal use of natural product mixtures often claim that they are more effective than purified compounds due to beneficial "synergistic" interactions. A less-discussed phenomenon, antagonism, in which effects of active constituents are masked by other compounds in a complex mixture, also occurs in natural product mixtures. Synergy and antagonism are notoriously difficult to study in a rigorous fashion, particularly given that natural products chemistry research methodology is typically devoted to reducing complexity and identifying single active constituents for drug development. This report represents a critical review with commentary about the current state of the scientific literature as it relates to studying combination effects (including both synergy and antagonism) in natural product extracts. We provide particular emphasis on analytical and Big Data approaches for identifying synergistic or antagonistic combinations and elucidating the mechanisms that underlie their interactions. Specific case studies of botanicals in which synergistic interactions have been documented are also discussed. The topic of synergy is important given that consumer use of botanical natural products and associated safety concerns continue to garner attention by the public and the media. Guidance by the natural products community is needed to provide strategies for effective evaluation of safety and toxicity of botanical mixtures and to drive discovery in botanical natural product research.

Drug Combinations: Mathematical Modeling and Networking Methods

Treatments consisting of mixtures of pharmacological agents have been shown to have superior effects to treatments involving single compounds. Given the vast amount of possible combinations involving multiple drugs and the restrictions in time and resources required to test all such combinations in vitro, mathematical methods are essential to model the interactive behavior of the drug mixture and the target, ultimately allowing one to better predict the outcome of the combination. In this review, we investigate various mathematical methods that model combination therapies. This survey includes the methods that focus on predicting the outcome of drug combinations with respect to synergism and antagonism, as well as the methods that explore the dynamics of combination therapy and its role in combating drug resistance. This comprehensive investigation of the mathematical methods includes models that employ pharmacodynamics equations, those that rely on signaling and how the underlying chemical networks are affected by the topological structure of the target proteins, and models that are based on stochastic models for evolutionary dynamics. Additionally, this article reviews computational methods including mathematical algorithms, machine learning, and search algorithms that can identify promising combinations of drug compounds. A description of existing data and software resources is provided that can support investigations in drug combination therapies. Finally, the article concludes with a summary of future directions for investigation by the research community.

Revealing Drug-Target Interactions with Computational Models and Algorithms

Background: Identifying possible drug-target interactions (DTIs) has become an important task in drug research and development. Although high-throughput screening is becoming available, experimental methods narrow down the validation space because of extremely high cost, low success rate, and time consumption. Therefore, various computational models have been exploited to infer DTI candidates. Methods: We introduced relevant databases and packages, mainly provided a comprehensive review of computational models for DTI identification, including network-based algorithms and machine learning-based methods. Specially, machine learning-based methods mainly include bipartite local model, matrix factorization, regularized least squares, and deep learning. Results: Although computational methods have obtained significant improvement in the process of DTI prediction, these models have their limitations. We discussed potential avenues for boosting DTI prediction accuracy as well as further directions.

Response envelope analysis for quantitative evaluation of drug combinations

MOTIVATION

The concept of synergy between two agents, over a century old, is important to the fields of biology, chemistry, pharmacology and medicine. A key step in drug combination analysis is the selection of an additivity model to identify combination effects including synergy, additivity and antagonism. Existing methods for identifying and interpreting those combination effects have limitations.

RESULTS

We present here a computational framework, termed response envelope analysis (REA), that makes use of 3D response surfaces formed by generalized Loewe Additivity and Bliss Independence models of interaction to evaluate drug combination effects. Because the two models imply two extreme limits of drug interaction (mutually exclusive and mutually non-exclusive), a response envelope defined by them provides a quantitatively stringent additivity model for identifying combination effects without knowing the inhibition mechanism. As a demonstration, we apply REA to representative published data from large screens of anticancer and antibiotic combinations. We show that REA is more accurate than existing methods and provides more consistent results in the context of cross-experiment evaluation.

AVAILABILITY AND IMPLEMENTATION

The open-source software package associated with REA is available at: https://github.com/4dsoftware/rea.

SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION

Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.

CSgator: an integrated web platform for compound set analysis

Drug discovery typically involves investigation of a set of compounds (e.g. drug screening hits) in terms of target, disease, and bioactivity. CSgator is a comprehensive analytic tool for set-wise interpretation of compounds. It has two unique analytic features of Compound Set Enrichment Analysis (CSEA) and Compound Cluster Analysis (CCA), which allows batch analysis of compound set in terms of (i) target, (ii) bioactivity, (iii) disease, and (iv) structure. CSEA and CCA present enriched profiles of targets and bioactivities in a compound set, which leads to novel insights on underlying drug mode-of-action, and potential targets. Notably, we propose a novel concept of 'Hit Enriched Assays", i.e. bioassays of which hits are enriched among a given set of compounds. As an example, we show its utility in revealing drug mode-of-action or identifying hidden targets for anti-lymphangiogenesis screening hits. CSgator is available at http://csgator.ewha.ac.kr , and most analytic results are downloadable.

CANCROX: a cross-species cancer therapy database

Cancer comprises a set of more than 200 diseases resulting from the uncontrolled growth of cells that invade tissues and organs, which can spread to other regions of the body. The types of cancer found in humans are also described in animal models, a fact that has raised the interest of the scientific community in comparative oncology studies. In this study, bioinformatics tools were used to implement a computational model that uses text mining and natural language processing to construct a reference database that relates human and canine genes potentially associated with cancer, defining genetic pathways and information about cancer and cancer therapies. The CANCROX reference database was constructed by processing the scientific literature and lists more than 1300 drugs and therapies used to treat cancer, in addition to over 10 000 combinations of these drugs, including 40 types of cancer. A user-friendly interface was developed that enables researchers to search for different types of information about therapies, drug combinations, genes and types of cancer. In addition, data visualization tools allow to explore and relate different drugs and therapies for the treatment of cancer, providing information for groups studying animal models, in this case the dog, as well as groups studying cancer in humans.

MDAD: A Special Resource for Microbe-Drug Associations

The human-associated microbiota is diverse and complex. It takes an essential role in human health and behavior and is closely related to the occurrence and development of disease. Although the diversity and distribution of microbial communities have been widely studied, little is known about the function and dynamics of microbes in the human body or the complex mechanisms of interaction between them and drugs, which are important for drug discovery and design. A high-quality comprehensive microbe and drug association database will be extremely beneficial to explore the relationship between them. In this article, we developed the Microbe-Drug Association Database (MDAD), a collection of clinically or experimentally supported associations between microbes and drugs, collecting 5,055 entries that include 1,388 drugs and 180 microbes from multiple drug databases and related publications. Moreover, we provided detailed annotations for each record, including the molecular form of drugs or hyperlinks from DrugBank, microbe target information from Uniprot and the original reference links. We hope MDAD will be a useful resource for deeper understanding of microbe and drug interactions and will also be beneficial to drug design, disease therapy and human health.

Recent advances in combinatorial drug screening and synergy scoring

Treatment of complex diseases such as cancer, cardiovascular disease, diabetes or neurological disorders frequently warrants the utilization of drug combinations for therapeutic intervention. In fact, the most successful example is the current standard of care for HIV patients. However, identification of successful drug cocktails is not a simple task and is hampered by lack of standardization in terminology, experimental protocols and models as well as data analysis. Here we discuss the most recent developments in combinatorial drug screening by covering technological advancements in screening strategies, cellular model systems as well as novel drug classes. We believe the research progress being made provides promising basis to build on and identify, develop and optimize efficacious clinically relevant combinatorial drug treatments.