Predicting Drug-Target Affinity Based on Recurrent Neural Networks and Graph Convolutional Neural Networks

Title:Predicting Drug-Target Affinity Based on Recurrent Neural Networks and Graph Convolutional Neural Networks

Volume: 25 Issue: 4

Author(s): Qingyu Tian*, Mao Ding*, Hui Yang, Caibin Yue, Yue Zhong, Zhenzhen Du, Dayan Liu, Jiali Liu and Yufeng Deng

Affiliation:

• College of Computer Science and Technology, China University of Petroleum, Qingdao 266580, Shandong,China

• Department of Neurology Medicine, The Second Hospital, Cheeloo College of Medicine, Shandong University Jinan 250033,China
• College of Computer Science and Technology, China University of Petroleum, Qingdao 266580, Shandong, China

Keywords: Drug repurposing, drug-target affinity, SMILES, BiGRU, LSTM, proteins.

Abstract: Background: Drug development requires a lot of money and time, and the outcome of the challenge is unknown. So, there is an urgent need for researchers to find a new approach that can reduce costs. Therefore, the identification of drug-target interactions (DTIs) has been a critical step in the early stages of drug discovery. These computational methods aim to narrow the search space for novel DTIs and to elucidate the functional background of drugs. Most of the methods developed so far use binary classification to predict the presence or absence of interactions between the drug and the target. However, it is more informative but also more challenging to predict the strength of the binding between a drug and its target. If the strength is not strong enough, such a DTI may not be useful. Hence, the development of methods to predict drug-target affinity (DTA) is of significant importance

Method: We have improved the GraphDTA model from a dual-channel model to a triple-channel model. We interpreted the target/protein sequences as time series and extracted their features using the LSTM network. For the drug, we considered both the molecular structure and the local chemical background, retaining the four variant networks used in GraphDTA to extract the topological features of the drug and capturing the local chemical background of the atoms in the drug by using BiGRU. Thus, we obtained the latent features of the target and two latent features of the drug. The connection of these three feature vectors is then inputted into a 2 layer FC network, and a valuable binding affinity is the output.

Result: We used the Davis and Kiba datasets, using 80% of the data for training and 20% of the data for validation. Our model showed better performance when compared with the experimental results of GraphDTA

Conclusion: In this paper, we altered the GraphDTA model to predict drug-target affinity. It represents the drug as a graph and extracts the two-dimensional drug information using a graph convolutional neural network. Simultaneously, the drug and protein targets are represented as a word vector, and the convolutional neural network is used to extract the time-series information of the drug and the target. We demonstrate that our improved method has better performance than the original method. In particular, our model has better performance in the evaluation of benchmark databases.

Cite this article as:

Tian Qingyu*, Ding Mao*, Yang Hui , Yue Caibin , Zhong Yue , Du Zhenzhen, Liu Dayan , Liu Jiali and Deng Yufeng , Predicting Drug-Target Affinity Based on Recurrent Neural Networks and Graph Convolutional Neural Networks, Combinatorial Chemistry & High Throughput Screening 2022; 25 (4) . https://dx.doi.org/10.2174/1386207324666210215101825