MGAE-DC: Predicting the synergistic effects of drug combinations through multi-channel graph autoencoders.

Accurate prediction of synergistic effects of drug combinations can reduce the experimental costs for drug development and facilitate the discovery of novel efficacious combination therapies for clinical studies. The drug combinations with high synergy scores are regarded as synergistic ones, while...

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Main Authors: Peng Zhang, Shikui Tu
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: Public Library of Science (PLoS) 2023-03-01
Series:PLoS Computational Biology
Online Access:https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1010951
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author Peng Zhang
Shikui Tu
author_facet Peng Zhang
Shikui Tu
author_sort Peng Zhang
collection DOAJ
description Accurate prediction of synergistic effects of drug combinations can reduce the experimental costs for drug development and facilitate the discovery of novel efficacious combination therapies for clinical studies. The drug combinations with high synergy scores are regarded as synergistic ones, while those with moderate or low synergy scores are additive or antagonistic ones. The existing methods usually exploit the synergy data from the aspect of synergistic drug combinations, paying little attention to the additive or antagonistic ones. Also, they usually do not leverage the common patterns of drug combinations across different cell lines. In this paper, we propose a multi-channel graph autoencoder (MGAE)-based method for predicting the synergistic effects of drug combinations (DC), and shortly denote it as MGAE-DC. A MGAE model is built to learn the drug embeddings by considering not only synergistic combinations but also additive and antagonistic ones as three input channels. The later two channels guide the model to explicitly characterize the features of non-synergistic combinations through an encoder-decoder learning process, and thus the drug embeddings become more discriminative between synergistic and non-synergistic combinations. In addition, an attention mechanism is incorporated to fuse each cell-line's drug embeddings across various cell lines, and a common drug embedding is extracted to capture the invariant patterns by developing a set of cell-line shared decoders. The generalization performance of our model is further improved with the invariant patterns. With the cell-line specific and common drug embeddings, our method is extended to predict the synergy scores of drug combinations by a neural network module. Experiments on four benchmark datasets demonstrate that MGAE-DC consistently outperforms the state-of-the-art methods. In-depth literature survey is conducted to find that many drug combinations predicted by MGAE-DC are supported by previous experimental studies. The source code and data are available at https://github.com/yushenshashen/MGAE-DC.
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spelling doaj.art-455994a2ba02425a9ca43c30ac7f10a52023-04-09T05:31:39ZengPublic Library of Science (PLoS)PLoS Computational Biology1553-734X1553-73582023-03-01193e101095110.1371/journal.pcbi.1010951MGAE-DC: Predicting the synergistic effects of drug combinations through multi-channel graph autoencoders.Peng ZhangShikui TuAccurate prediction of synergistic effects of drug combinations can reduce the experimental costs for drug development and facilitate the discovery of novel efficacious combination therapies for clinical studies. The drug combinations with high synergy scores are regarded as synergistic ones, while those with moderate or low synergy scores are additive or antagonistic ones. The existing methods usually exploit the synergy data from the aspect of synergistic drug combinations, paying little attention to the additive or antagonistic ones. Also, they usually do not leverage the common patterns of drug combinations across different cell lines. In this paper, we propose a multi-channel graph autoencoder (MGAE)-based method for predicting the synergistic effects of drug combinations (DC), and shortly denote it as MGAE-DC. A MGAE model is built to learn the drug embeddings by considering not only synergistic combinations but also additive and antagonistic ones as three input channels. The later two channels guide the model to explicitly characterize the features of non-synergistic combinations through an encoder-decoder learning process, and thus the drug embeddings become more discriminative between synergistic and non-synergistic combinations. In addition, an attention mechanism is incorporated to fuse each cell-line's drug embeddings across various cell lines, and a common drug embedding is extracted to capture the invariant patterns by developing a set of cell-line shared decoders. The generalization performance of our model is further improved with the invariant patterns. With the cell-line specific and common drug embeddings, our method is extended to predict the synergy scores of drug combinations by a neural network module. Experiments on four benchmark datasets demonstrate that MGAE-DC consistently outperforms the state-of-the-art methods. In-depth literature survey is conducted to find that many drug combinations predicted by MGAE-DC are supported by previous experimental studies. The source code and data are available at https://github.com/yushenshashen/MGAE-DC.https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1010951
spellingShingle Peng Zhang
Shikui Tu
MGAE-DC: Predicting the synergistic effects of drug combinations through multi-channel graph autoencoders.
PLoS Computational Biology
title MGAE-DC: Predicting the synergistic effects of drug combinations through multi-channel graph autoencoders.
title_full MGAE-DC: Predicting the synergistic effects of drug combinations through multi-channel graph autoencoders.
title_fullStr MGAE-DC: Predicting the synergistic effects of drug combinations through multi-channel graph autoencoders.
title_full_unstemmed MGAE-DC: Predicting the synergistic effects of drug combinations through multi-channel graph autoencoders.
title_short MGAE-DC: Predicting the synergistic effects of drug combinations through multi-channel graph autoencoders.
title_sort mgae dc predicting the synergistic effects of drug combinations through multi channel graph autoencoders
url https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1010951
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AT shikuitu mgaedcpredictingthesynergisticeffectsofdrugcombinationsthroughmultichannelgraphautoencoders