Prediction of Drug-Gene Interaction by Using Metapath2vec

Small molecules targeting microRNAs: new opportunities and challenges in precision cancer therapy

Noncoding RNAs, especially miRNAs, play a pivotal role in cancer initiation and metastasis, underscoring their susceptibility to precise modulation via small molecule inhibitors. This review examines the innovative strategy of targeting oncogenic miRNAs with small drug-like molecules, an approach that can reshape the cancer treatment landscape. We review the current understanding of the multifaceted roles of miRNAs in oncogenesis, highlighting emerging therapeutic paradigms that have the potential to expand cancer treatment options. As research on small molecule inhibitors of miRNA is still in its early stages, ongoing investigative efforts and the development of new technologies and chemical matter are essential to fulfill the significant potential of this innovative approach to cancer treatment.

TeM-DTBA: time-efficient drug target binding affinity prediction using multiple modalities with Lasso feature selection

Drug discovery, especially virtual screening and drug repositioning, can be accelerated through deeper understanding and prediction of Drug Target Interactions (DTIs). The advancement of deep learning as well as the time and financial costs associated with conventional wet-lab experiments have made computational methods for DTI prediction more popular. However, the majority of these computational methods handle the DTI problem as a binary classification task, ignoring the quantitative binding affinity that determines the drug efficacy to their target proteins. Moreover, computational space as well as execution time of the model is often ignored over accuracy. To address these challenges, we introduce a novel method, called Time-efficient Multimodal Drug Target Binding Affinity (TeM-DTBA), which predicts the binding affinity between drugs and targets by fusing different modalities based on compound structures and target sequences. We employ the Lasso feature selection method, which lowers the dimensionality of feature vectors and speeds up the proposed model training time by more than 50%. The results from two benchmark datasets demonstrate that our method outperforms state-of-the-art methods in terms of performance. The mean squared errors of 18.8% and 23.19%, achieved on the KIBA and Davis datasets, respectively, suggest that our method is more accurate in predicting drug-target binding affinity.

Predicting Drug-Protein Interactions by Self-Adaptively Adjusting the Topological Structure of the Heterogeneous Network

Many powerful computational methods based on graph neural networks (GNNs) have been proposed to predict drug-protein interactions (DPIs). It can effectively reduce laboratory workload and the cost of drug discovery and drug repurposing. However, many clinical functions of drugs and proteins are unknown due to their unobserved indications. Therefore, it is difficult to establish a reliable drug-protein heterogeneous network that can describe the relationships between drugs and proteins based on the available information. To solve this problem, we propose a DPI prediction method that can self-adaptively adjust the topological structure of the heterogeneous networks, and name it SATS. SATS establishes a representation learning module based on graph attention network to carry out the drug-protein heterogeneous network. It can self-adaptively learn the relationships among the nodes based on their attributes and adjust the topological structure of the network according to the training loss of the model. Finally, SATS predicts the interaction propensity between drugs and proteins based on their embeddings. The experimental results show that SATS can effectively improve the topological structure of the network. The performance of SATS outperforms several state-of-the-art DPI prediction methods under various evaluation metrics. These prove that SATS is useful to deal with incomplete data and unreliable networks. The case studies on the top section of the prediction results further demonstrate that SATS is powerful for discovering novel DPIs.

Prediction of potential small molecule-miRNA associations based on heterogeneous network representation learning

MicroRNAs (miRNAs) are closely associated with the occurrences and developments of many complex human diseases. Increasing studies have shown that miRNAs emerge as new therapeutic targets of small molecule (SM) drugs. Since traditional experiment methods are expensive and time consuming, it is particularly crucial to find efficient computational approaches to predict potential small molecule-miRNA (SM-miRNA) associations. Considering that integrating multi-source heterogeneous information related with SM-miRNA association prediction would provide a comprehensive insight into the features of both SMs and miRNAs, we proposed a novel model of Small Molecule-MiRNA Association prediction based on Heterogeneous Network Representation Learning (SMMA-HNRL) for more precisely predicting the potential SM-miRNA associations. In SMMA-HNRL, a novel heterogeneous information network was constructed with SM nodes, miRNA nodes and disease nodes. To access and utilize of the topological information of the heterogeneous information network, feature vectors of SM and miRNA nodes were obtained by two different heterogeneous network representation learning algorithms (HeGAN and HIN2Vec) respectively and merged with connect operation. Finally, LightGBM was chosen as the classifier of SMMA-HNRL for predicting potential SM-miRNA associations. The 10-fold cross validations were conducted to evaluate the prediction performance of SMMA-HNRL, it achieved an area under of ROC curve of 0.9875, which was superior to other three state-of-the-art models. With two independent validation datasets, the test experiment results revealed the robustness of our model. Moreover, three case studies were performed. As a result, 35, 37, and 22 miRNAs among the top 50 predicting miRNAs associated with 5-FU, cisplatin, and imatinib were validated by experimental literature works respectively, which confirmed the effectiveness of SMMA-HNRL. The source code and experimental data of SMMA-HNRL are available at https://github.com/SMMA-HNRL/SMMA-HNRL.

Pharmacogenes that demonstrate high association evidence according to CPIC, DPWG, and PharmGKB

BACKGROUND

Different levels of evidence related to the variable responses of individuals to drug treatment have been reported in various pharmacogenomic (PGx) databases. Identification of gene-drug pairs with strong association evidence can be helpful in prioritizing the implementation of PGx guidelines and focusing on a gene panel. This study aimed to determine the pharmacogenes with the highest evidence-based association and to indicate their involvement in drug-gene interactions.

METHODOLOGY

The publicly available datasets CPIC, DPWG, and PharmGKB were selected to determine the pharmacogenes with the highest drug outcome associations. The upper two levels of evidence rated by the three scoring methods were specified (levels A-B in CPIC, 3-4 in DPWG, or 1-2 levels in PharmGKB). The identified pharmacogenes were further ranked in this study based on the number of medications they interacted with.

RESULTS

Fifty pharmacogenes, with high to moderately high evidence of associations with drug response alterations, with potential influence on the therapeutic and/or toxicity outcomes of 152 drugs were identified. CYP2D6, CYP2C9, CYP2C19, G6PD, HLA-B, SLCO1B1, CACNA1S, RYR1, MT-RNR1, and IFNL4 are the top 10 pharmacogenes, where each is predicted to impact patients' responses to ≥5 drugs.

CONCLUSION

This study identified the most important pharmacogenes based on the highest-ranked association evidence and their frequency of involvement in affecting multiple drugs. The obtained data is useful for customizing a gene panel for PGx testing. Identifying the strength of scientific evidence supporting drug-gene interactions aids drug prescribers in making the best clinical decision.

Metapath Aggregated Graph Neural Network and Tripartite Heterogeneous Networks for Microbe-Disease Prediction

More and more studies have shown that understanding microbe-disease associations cannot only reveal the pathogenesis of diseases, but also promote the diagnosis and prognosis of diseases. Because traditional medical experiments are time-consuming and expensive, many computational methods have been proposed in recent years to identify potential microbe-disease associations. In this study, we propose a method based on heterogeneous network and metapath aggregated graph neural network (MAGNN) to predict microbe-disease associations, called MATHNMDA. First, we introduce microbe-drug interactions, drug-disease associations, and microbe-disease associations to construct a microbe-drug-disease heterogeneous network. Then we take the heterogeneous network as input to MAGNN. Second, for each layer of MAGNN, we carry out intra-metapath aggregation with a multi-head attention mechanism to learn the structural and semantic information embedded in the target node context, the metapath-based neighbor nodes, and the context between them, by encoding the metapath instances under the metapath definition mode. We then use inter-metapath aggregation with an attention mechanism to combine the semantic information of all different metapaths. Third, we can get the final embedding of microbe nodes and disease nodes based on the output of the last layer in the MAGNN. Finally, we predict potential microbe-disease associations by reconstructing the microbe-disease association matrix. In addition, we evaluated the performance of MATHNMDA by comparing it with that of its variants, some state-of-the-art methods, and different datasets. The results suggest that MATHNMDA is an effective prediction method. The case studies on asthma, inflammatory bowel disease (IBD), and coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) further validate the effectiveness of MATHNMDA.

MSPEDTI: Prediction of Drug-Target Interactions via Molecular Structure with Protein Evolutionary Information

The key to new drug discovery and development is first and foremost the search for molecular targets of drugs, thus advancing drug discovery and drug repositioning. However, traditional drug-target interactions (DTIs) is a costly, lengthy, high-risk, and low-success-rate system project. Therefore, more and more pharmaceutical companies are trying to use computational technologies to screen existing drug molecules and mine new drugs, leading to accelerating new drug development. In the current study, we designed a deep learning computational model MSPEDTI based on Molecular Structure and Protein Evolutionary to predict the potential DTIs. The model first fuses protein evolutionary information and drug structure information, then a deep learning convolutional neural network (CNN) to mine its hidden features, and finally accurately predicts the associated DTIs by extreme learning machine (ELM). In cross-validation experiments, MSPEDTI achieved 94.19%, 90.95%, 87.95%, and 86.11% prediction accuracy in the gold-standard datasets enzymes, ion channels, G-protein-coupled receptors (GPCRs), and nuclear receptors, respectively. MSPEDTI showed its competitive ability in ablation experiments and comparison with previous excellent methods. Additionally, 7 of 10 potential DTIs predicted by MSPEDTI were substantiated by the classical database. These excellent outcomes demonstrate the ability of MSPEDTI to provide reliable drug candidate targets and strongly facilitate the development of drug repositioning and drug development.

Emerging landscape of molecular interaction networks: Opportunities, challenges and prospects

Network biology finds application in interpreting molecular interaction networks and providing insightful inferences using graph theoretical analysis of biological systems. The integration of computational bio-modelling approaches with different hybrid network-based techniques provides additional information about the behaviour of complex systems. With increasing advances in high-throughput technologies in biological research, attempts have been made to incorporate this information into network structures, which has led to a continuous update of network biology approaches over time. The newly minted centrality measures accommodate the details of omics data and regulatory network structure information. The unification of graph network properties with classical mathematical and computational modelling approaches and technologically advanced approaches like machine-learning- and artificial intelligence-based algorithms leverages the potential application of these techniques. These computational advances prove beneficial and serve various applications such as essential gene prediction, identification of drug–disease interaction and gene prioritization. Hence, in this review, we have provided a comprehensive overview of the emerging landscape of molecular interaction networks using graph theoretical approaches. With the aim to provide information on the wide range of applications of network biology approaches in understanding the interaction and regulation of genes, proteins, enzymes and metabolites at different molecular levels, we have reviewed the methods that utilize network topological properties, emerging hybrid network-based approaches and applications that integrate machine learning techniques to analyse molecular interaction networks. Further, we have discussed the applications of these approaches in biomedical research with a note on future prospects.

Task-driven knowledge graph filtering improves prioritizing drugs for repurposing

Background

Drug repurposing aims at finding new targets for already developed drugs. It becomes more relevant as the cost of discovering new drugs steadily increases. To find new potential targets for a drug, an abundance of methods and existing biomedical knowledge from different domains can be leveraged. Recently, knowledge graphs have emerged in the biomedical domain that integrate information about genes, drugs, diseases and other biological domains. Knowledge graphs can be used to predict new connections between compounds and diseases, leveraging the interconnected biomedical data around them. While real world use cases such as drug repurposing are only interested in one specific relation type, widely used knowledge graph embedding models simultaneously optimize over all relation types in the graph. This can lead the models to underfit the data that is most relevant for the desired relation type. For example, if we want to learn embeddings to predict links between compounds and diseases but almost the entirety of relations in the graph is incident to other pairs of entity types, then the resulting embeddings are likely not optimised to predict links between compounds and diseases. We propose a method that leverages domain knowledge in the form of metapaths and use them to filter two biomedical knowledge graphs (Hetionet and DRKG) for the purpose of improving performance on the prediction task of drug repurposing while simultaneously increasing computational efficiency.

Results

We find that our method reduces the number of entities by 60% on Hetionet and 26% on DRKG, while leading to an improvement in prediction performance of up to 40.8% on Hetionet and 14.2% on DRKG, with an average improvement of 20.6% on Hetionet and 8.9% on DRKG. Additionally, prioritization of antiviral compounds for SARS CoV-2 improves after task-driven filtering is applied.

Conclusion

Knowledge graphs contain facts that are counter productive for specific tasks, in our case drug repurposing. We also demonstrate that these facts can be removed, resulting in an improved performance in that task and a more efficient learning process.

Supplementary Information

The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1186/s12859-022-04608-y.

Text Mining Protocol to Retrieve Significant Drug-Gene Interactions from PubMed Abstracts

Genes and proteins form the basis of all cellular processes and ensure a smooth functioning of the human system. The diseases caused in humans can be either genetic in nature or may be caused due to external factors. Genetic diseases are mainly the result of any anomaly in gene/protein structure or function. This disruption interferes with the normal expression of cellular components. Against external factors, even though the immunogenicity of every individual protects them to a certain extent from infections, they are still susceptible to other disease-causing agents. Understanding the biological pathway/entities that could be targeted by specific drugs is an essential component of drug discovery. The traditional drug target discovery process is time-consuming and practically not feasible. A computational approach could provide speed and efficiency to the method. With the presence of vast biomedical literature, text mining also seems to be an obvious choice which could efficiently aid with other computational methods in identifying drug-gene targets. These could aid in initial stages of reviewing the disease components or can even aid parallel in extracting drug-disease-gene/protein relationships from literature. The present chapter aims at finding drug-gene interactions and how the information could be explored for drug interaction.

Learning Representation of Molecules in Association Network for Predicting Intermolecular Associations

A key aim of post-genomic biomedical research is to systematically understand molecules and their interactions in human cells. Multiple biomolecules coordinate to sustain life activities, and interactions between various biomolecules are interconnected. However, existing studies usually only focusing on associations between two or very limited types of molecules. In this study, we propose a network representation learning based computational framework MAN-SDNE to predict any intermolecular associations. More specifically, we constructed a large-scale molecular association network of multiple biomolecules in human by integrating associations among long non-coding RNA, microRNA, protein, drug, and disease, containing 6,528 molecular nodes, 9 kind of,105,546 associations. And then, the feature of each node is represented by its network proximity and attribute features. Furthermore, these features are used to train Random Forest classifier to predict intermolecular associations. MAN-SDNE achieves a remarkable performance with an AUC of 0.9552 and an AUPR of 0.9338 under five-fold cross-validation. To indicate the ability to predict specific types of interactions, a case study for predicting lncRNA-protein interactions using MAN-SDNE is also executed. Experimental results demonstrate this work offers a systematic insight for understanding the synergistic associations between molecules and complex diseases and provides a network-based computational tool to systematically explore intermolecular interactions.

GADTI: Graph Autoencoder Approach for DTI Prediction From Heterogeneous Network

Identifying drug–target interaction (DTI) is the basis for drug development. However, the method of using biochemical experiments to discover drug-target interactions has low coverage and high costs. Many computational methods have been developed to predict potential drug-target interactions based on known drug-target interactions, but the accuracy of these methods still needs to be improved. In this article, a graph autoencoder approach for DTI prediction (GADTI) was proposed to discover potential interactions between drugs and targets using a heterogeneous network, which integrates diverse drug-related and target-related datasets. Its encoder consists of two components: a graph convolutional network (GCN) and a random walk with restart (RWR). And the decoder is DistMult, a matrix factorization model, using embedding vectors from encoder to discover potential DTIs. The combination of GCN and RWR can provide nodes with more information through a larger neighborhood, and it can also avoid over-smoothing and computational complexity caused by multi-layer message passing. Based on the 10-fold cross-validation, we conduct three experiments in different scenarios. The results show that GADTI is superior to the baseline methods in both the area under the receiver operator characteristic curve and the area under the precision–recall curve. In addition, based on the latest Drugbank dataset (V5.1.8), the case study shows that 54.8% of new approved DTIs are predicted by GADTI.

Association Mining to Identify Microbe Drug Interactions Based on Heterogeneous Network Embedding Representation

Accurately identifying microbe-drug associations plays a critical role in drug development and precision medicine. Considering that the conventional wet-lab method is time-consuming, labor-intensive and expensive, computational approach is an alternative choice. The increasing availability of numerous biological data provides a great opportunity to systematically understand complex interaction mechanisms between microbes and drugs. However, few computational methods have been developed for microbe drug prediction. In this work, we leverage multiple sources of biomedical data to construct a heterogeneous network for microbes and drugs, including drug-drug interactions, microbe-microbe interactions and microbe-drug associations. And then we propose a novel Heterogeneous Network Embedding Representation framework for Microbe-Drug Association prediction, named (HNERMDA), by combining metapath2vec with bipartite network recommendation. In this framework, we introduce metapath2vec, a heterogeneous network representation learning method, to learn low-dimensional embedding representations for microbes and drugs. Following that, we further design a bias bipartite network projection recommendation algorithm to improve prediction accuracy. Comprehensive experiments on two datasets, named MDAD and aBiofilm, demonstrated that our model consistently outperformed five baseline methods in three types of cross-validations. Case study on two popular drugs (i.e., Ciprofloxacin and Pefloxacin) further validated the effectiveness of our HNERMDA model in inferring potential target microbes for drugs.

Propositionalization and embeddings: two sides of the same coin

Data preprocessing is an important component of machine learning pipelines, which requires ample time and resources. An integral part of preprocessing is data transformation into the format required by a given learning algorithm. This paper outlines some of the modern data processing techniques used in relational learning that enable data fusion from different input data types and formats into a single table data representation, focusing on the propositionalization and embedding data transformation approaches. While both approaches aim at transforming data into tabular data format, they use different terminology and task definitions, are perceived to address different goals, and are used in different contexts. This paper contributes a unifying framework that allows for improved understanding of these two data transformation techniques by presenting their unified definitions, and by explaining the similarities and differences between the two approaches as variants of a unified complex data transformation task. In addition to the unifying framework, the novelty of this paper is a unifying methodology combining propositionalization and embeddings, which benefits from the advantages of both in solving complex data transformation and learning tasks. We present two efficient implementations of the unifying methodology: an instance-based PropDRM approach, and a feature-based PropStar approach to data transformation and learning, together with their empirical evaluation on several relational problems. The results show that the new algorithms can outperform existing relational learners and can solve much larger problems.

A Survey of Network Embedding for Drug Analysis and Prediction

Traditional network-based computational methods have shown good results in drug analysis and prediction. However, these methods are time consuming and lack universality, and it is difficult to exploit the auxiliary information of nodes and edges. Network embedding provides a promising way for alleviating the above problems by transforming network into a low-dimensional space while preserving network structure and auxiliary information. This thus facilitates the application of machine learning algorithms for subsequent processing. Network embedding has been introduced into drug analysis and prediction in the last few years, and has shown superior performance over traditional methods. However, there is no systematic review of this issue. This article offers a comprehensive survey of the primary network embedding methods and their applications in drug analysis and prediction. The network embedding technologies applied in homogeneous network and heterogeneous network are investigated and compared, including matrix decomposition, random walk, and deep learning. Especially, the Graph neural network (GNN) methods in deep learning are highlighted. Further, the applications of network embedding in drug similarity estimation, drug-target interaction prediction, adverse drug reactions prediction, protein function and therapeutic peptides prediction are discussed. Several future potential research directions are also discussed.

Application of deep learning methods in biological networks

The increase in biological data and the formation of various biomolecule interaction databases enable us to obtain diverse biological networks. These biological networks provide a wealth of raw materials for further understanding of biological systems, the discovery of complex diseases and the search for therapeutic drugs. However, the increase in data also increases the difficulty of biological networks analysis. Therefore, algorithms that can handle large, heterogeneous and complex data are needed to better analyze the data of these network structures and mine their useful information. Deep learning is a branch of machine learning that extracts more abstract features from a larger set of training data. Through the establishment of an artificial neural network with a network hierarchy structure, deep learning can extract and screen the input information layer by layer and has representation learning ability. The improved deep learning algorithm can be used to process complex and heterogeneous graph data structures and is increasingly being applied to the mining of network data information. In this paper, we first introduce the used network data deep learning models. After words, we summarize the application of deep learning on biological networks. Finally, we discuss the future development prospects of this field.

Predicting drug-disease associations with heterogeneous network embedding

The prediction of drug-disease associations holds great potential for precision medicine in the era of big data and is important for the identification of new indications for existing drugs. The associations between drugs and diseases can be regarded as a complex heterogeneous network with multiple types of nodes and links. In this paper, we propose a method, namely HED (Heterogeneous network Embedding for Drug-disease association), to predict potential associations between drugs and diseases based on a drug-disease heterogeneous network. Specifically, with the heterogeneous network constructed from known drug-disease associations, HED employs network embedding to characterize drug-disease associations and then trains a classifier to predict novel potential drug-disease associations. The results on two real datasets show that HED outperforms existing popular approaches. Furthermore, some of our predictions have been verified by evidence from literature. For instance, carvedilol, a drug that was originally used for heart failure, left ventricular dysfunction, and hypertension, is predicted to be useful for atrial fibrillation by HED, which is supported by clinical trials.

An omics perspective on drug target discovery platforms

The drug discovery process starts with identification of a disease-modifying target. This critical step traditionally begins with manual investigation of scientific literature and biomedical databases to gather evidence linking molecular target to disease, and to evaluate the efficacy, safety and commercial potential of the target. The high-throughput and affordability of current omics technologies, allowing quantitative measurements of many putative targets (e.g. DNA, RNA, protein, metabolite), has exponentially increased the volume of scientific data available for this arduous task. Therefore, computational platforms identifying and ranking disease-relevant targets from existing biomedical data sources, including omics databases, are needed. To date, more than 30 drug target discovery (DTD) platforms exist. They provide information-rich databases and graphical user interfaces to help scientists identify putative targets and pre-evaluate their therapeutic efficacy and potential side effects. Here we survey and compare a set of popular DTD platforms that utilize multiple data sources and omics-driven knowledge bases (either directly or indirectly) for identifying drug targets. We also provide a description of omics technologies and related data repositories which are important for DTD tasks.

Comparison Study of Computational Prediction Tools for Drug-Target Binding Affinities

The drug development is generally arduous, costly, and success rates are low. Thus, the identification of drug-target interactions (DTIs) has become a crucial step in early stages of drug discovery. Consequently, developing computational approaches capable of identifying potential DTIs with minimum error rate are increasingly being pursued. These computational approaches aim to narrow down the search space for novel DTIs and shed light on drug functioning context. Most methods developed to date use binary classification to predict if the interaction between a drug and its target exists or not. However, it is more informative but also more challenging to predict the strength of the binding between a drug and its target. If that strength is not sufficiently strong, such DTI may not be useful. Therefore, the methods developed to predict drug-target binding affinities (DTBA) are of great value. In this study, we provide a comprehensive overview of the existing methods that predict DTBA. We focus on the methods developed using artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), and deep learning (DL) approaches, as well as related benchmark datasets and databases. Furthermore, guidance and recommendations are provided that cover the gaps and directions of the upcoming work in this research area. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first comprehensive comparison analysis of tools focused on DTBA with reference to AI/ML/DL.