ArticlePDF Available

Deep Learning Applications for Predicting Pharmacological Properties of Drugs and Drug Repurposing Using Transcriptomic Data

Authors:

Abstract and Figures

Deep learning is rapidly advancing many areas of science and technology with multiple success stories in image, text, voice and video recognition, robotics and autonomous driving. In this paper we demonstrate how deep neural networks (DNN) trained on large transcriptional response data sets can classify various drugs to therapeutic categories solely based on their transcriptional profiles. We used the perturbation samples of 678 drugs across A549, MCF-7 and PC-3 cell lines from the LINCS project and linked those to 12 therapeutic use categories derived from MeSH. To train the DNN, we utilized both gene level transcriptomic data and transcriptomic data processed using a pathway activation scoring algorithm, for a pooled dataset of samples perturbed with different concentrations of the drug for 6 and 24 hours. When applied to normalized gene expression data for “landmark genes,” DNN showed cross-validation mean F1 scores of 0.397, 0.285 and 0.234 on 3-, 5- and 12-category classification problems, respectively. At the pathway level DNN performed best with cross-validation mean F1 scores of 0.701, 0.596 and 0.546 on the same tasks. In both gene and pathway level classification, DNN convincingly outperformed support vector machine (SVM) model on every multiclass classification problem. For the first time we demonstrate a deep learning neural net trained on transcriptomic data to recognize pharmacological properties of multiple drugs across different biological systems and conditions. We also propose using deep neural net confusion matrices for drug repositioning. This work is a proof of principle for applying deep learning to drug discovery and development.
Content may be subject to copyright.
Deep Learning Applications for Predicting Pharmacological
Properties of Drugs and Drug Repurposing Using Transcriptomic
Data
Alexander Aliper,*
,
Sergey Plis,
,§
Artem Artemov,
Alvaro Ulloa,
§
Polina Mamoshina,
and Alex Zhavoronkov*
,,
Insilico Medicine, ETC, B301, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland 21218, United States
Datalytic Solutions, 1101 Yale Boulevard NE, Albuquerque, New Mexico 87106, United States
§
The Mind Research Network, Albuquerque, New Mexico 87106, United States
The Biogerontology Research Foundation, Oxford, U.K.
*
SSupporting Information
ABSTRACT: Deep learning is rapidly advancing many areas
of science and technology with multiple success stories in
image, text, voice and video recognition, robotics, and
autonomous driving. In this paper we demonstrate how deep
neural networks (DNN) trained on large transcriptional
response data sets can classify various drugs to therapeutic
categories solely based on their transcriptional proles. We
used the perturbation samples of 678 drugs across A549,
MCF-7, and PC-3 cell lines from the LINCS Project and
linked those to 12 therapeutic use categories derived from
MeSH. To train the DNN, we utilized both gene level transcriptomic data and transcriptomic data processed using a pathway
activation scoring algorithm, for a pooled data set of samples perturbed with dierent concentrations of the drug for 6 and 24
hours. In both pathway and gene level classication, DNN achieved high classication accuracy and convincingly outperformed
the support vector machine (SVM) model on every multiclass classication problem, however, models based on pathway level
data performed signicantly better. For the rst time we demonstrate a deep learning neural net trained on transcriptomic data to
recognize pharmacological properties of multiple drugs across dierent biological systems and conditions. We also propose using
deep neural net confusion matrices for drug repositioning. This work is a proof of principle for applying deep learning to drug
discovery and development.
KEYWORDS: deep learning, DNN, predictor, drug repurposing, drug discovery, confusion matrix, deep neural networks
INTRODUCTION
Drug discovery and development is a complicated and time and
resource consuming process, and various computational
approaches are regularly being developed to improve it. In
silico drug discovery
1,2
has evolved over the past decade and
oers a targeted, ecient approach compared to those of the
past, which often relied on either identifying active ingredients
in traditional remedies or, in many cases, serendipitous
discovery. Modern methods include data mining, structure
modeling (homology modeling), traditional machine learning
3
(ML), and its biologically inspired branch technique, deep
learning (DL).
4
DL
4
methods model high-level representations of data using
deep neural networks (DNNs). DNNs are exible multilayer
systems of connected and interacting articial neurons that
perform various data transformations. They have several hidden
layers of neurons, which number variation allows adjusting the
level of data abstraction. DL now plays a dominant role in the
areas of physics
5
and speech, signal, image, video, and text
mining and recognition,
6
improving state of the art perform-
ances by more than 30%, where the prior decade struggled to
obtain 12% improvements. Traditional machine learning
approaches have achieved signicant levels of classication
accuracy, but at the price of manually selected and tuned
features. Arguably, feature engineering is the dominating
research component in practical applications of ML. In
contrast, the power of NNs is in automatic feature learning
from massive data sets. Not only does it simplify manual and
laborious feature engineering but also it allows learning task-
optimal features.
Modern biology has entered the era of Big Data, wherein
data sets are too large, high-dimensional, and complex for
classical computational biology methods. The ability to learn at
Received: March 18, 2016
Revised: May 13, 2016
Accepted: May 20, 2016
Article
pubs.acs.org/molecularpharmaceutics
© XXXX American Chemical Society ADOI: 10.1021/acs.molpharmaceut.6b00248
Mol. Pharmaceutics XXXX, XXX, XXXXXX
This is an open access article published under an ACS AuthorChoice License, which permits
copying and redistribution of the article or any adaptations for non-commercial purposes.
the higher levels of abstraction made DL a promising and
eective tool for working with biological and chemical data.
7
Methods using DL architecture are capable of dealing with
sparse and complex information, which is especially demanded
in the analysis of high-dimensional gene expression data. Curse
of dimensionalityis one of the major problems of gene
expression data that can be solved by feature selection
implementing standard data projection methods as PCA or
more biologically relevant as pathway analysis.
8
DNNs
demonstrate the state-of-the-art performance extracting features
from sparse transcriptomics data (both mRNA and miRNA
data),
9
in classifying cancer using gene expression data
10
and
predicting splicing code patterns.
11
DL has been eectively
applied in biomodeling and structural genomics to predict
protein 3-D structure using protein sequence (ordered or
disordered protein (with lack of xed 3-D structure))
12,13
and
may become an essential tool for development of new drugs.
14
DL approaches were successfully implemented to predict
drugtarget interactions,
15
model reaction properties of
molecules,
16
and calculate toxicity of drugs.
17
As deep networks
incorporate more features from biology,
18
application breadth
and accuracy will likely increase.
Drug repurposing or target extension allows prediction of
new potential applications of medications or even new
therapeutic classes of drugs using gene expression data before
and after treatment (e.g., before and after incubation of a cell
line with multiple drugs). There are multiple in silico
approaches to drug discovery and classication,
1921
and
many attempts were made to predict transcriptional response
with functional properties of drugs.
2224
In this study we
addressed this problem by classifying various drugs to
therapeutic categories with DNN solely based on their
transcriptional proles. We used the perturbation samples of
X drugs across A549, MCF-7, and PC-3 cell lines from the
LINCS Project and linked those to 12 therapeutic use
categories derived from MeSH therapeutic use section (Figure
1). After that we independently used both gene expression level
data for landmark genesand pathway activation scores to
train DNN classier.
RESULTS
The main aim of this study was to apply and estimate the
accuracy of DL methods to classify various drugs to therapeutic
categories solely based on their transcriptional proles. In total,
we analyzed 26,420 drug perturbation samples for three cell
lines from the Broad LINCS database. All samples were
assigned to 12 specic therapeutic use categories according to
MeSH classication of the particular drug (Supplementary
Table 1). Since a number of drugs were present in multiple
categories, we considered only those drugs that belong only to
one category. To increase the number of samples in each of the
categories and to make the classication more robust for each
given drug, we aggregated all samples corresponding to all
possible perturbation time, perturbation concentration, and cell
line parameters (Supplementary Table 2).
When dealing with transcriptional data at the gene level, a
common problem is the so-called curse of dimensionality.
Indeed, when we applied DNN on gene level data for whole
data set of 12,797 genes, it did not perform very well, achieving
only 0.24 mean F1 score on 12 classes. So our rst step was
proper feature selection. Here we investigated two approaches:
pathway activation scoring and using landmark genesas new
features.
Pathway Level. For pathway level analysis we used a
previously established pathway analysis method called Onco-
Finder.
2530
It preserves biological function and allows for
dimensionality reduction at the same time. In contrast to other
pathway analysis tools, which mostly implement pathway
enrichment analysis, OncoFinder performs quantitative estima-
tion of signaling pathway activation strength, and the sign of the
resulting value indicates how signicantly the pathway is up- or
downregulated. All perturbation samples were analyzed with
this tool and for each sample we calculated pathway activation
proles for 271 signaling pathways. Samples with zero pathway
activation score for all of the pathways were considered as
insignicantly perturbed and were excluded from further
analysis. That resulted in a nal data set containing 308, 454,
and 433 drugs for A549, MCF7, and PC3 cell lines,
respectively, and totalling 9352 samples (Supplementary
Table 2).
Using this data set we built a deep learning classier based
only on pathway activation scores for drug perturbation proles
of 3 cell lines: A549, MCF-7, and PC-3. Making a classier
based on a pooled data set with dierent cell lines, drug
concentration, and perturbation time, we are able to estimate
the classication performance in recognizing complex drug
Figure 1. Study design. Gene expression data from LINCS Project was linked to 12 MeSH therapeutic use categories. DNN was trained separately
on gene expression level data for landmark genesand pathway activation scores for signicantly perturbed samples, forming input layers of 977 and
271 neural nodes, respectively.
Molecular Pharmaceutics Article
DOI: 10.1021/acs.molpharmaceut.6b00248
Mol. Pharmaceutics XXXX, XXX, XXXXXX
B
action patterns across dierent biological conditions. For the 3-
class classication problem we chose the most abundant
categories: antineoplastic, cardiovascular, and central nervous
system agents. DNN achieved 10-fold cross-validation mean F1
score of 0.701. We compared the results of DNN to another
popular classication algorithm called support vector machine
(SVM) trained via nested 3-fold cross validation for several
hyperparameters (see Materials and Methods). On 3-class
classication problem SVM performed with mean F1 score of
0.530.
Addition of gastrointestinal and anti-infective classes
decreased the mean F1 score of DNN to 0.596. Mean F1
score for SVM dropped as well, down to 0.417.
When all 12 classes were considered, the classication neural
performance decreased in a minor way, with a cross-validation
mean F1 score of 0.546. SVM performed with cross-validation
mean F1 score of 0.366 on the same 12-class classication
problem. The performance comparison of DNN and SVM on
investigated classication problems is depicted in Figure 2ac.
These results indicate that our model performance far exceeds
random chance,
31
and we can conclude that DNN out-
performed SVM on every multiclass classication problem.
Landmark Gene Level. In our second feature selection
approach we used a data set containing normalized gene
expression data for 977 landmark genes. According to the
authors of LINCS Project they can capture approximately 80%
of the information and possess great inferential value. For fair
comparison we trained DNN exactly the same way we did on
the pathway level. We used the same data set of 9352
signicantly perturbed samples and tested the performance of
DNN on the same classication problems. DNN trained on
landmark genedata performed with 10-fold cross-validation
mean F1 scores of 0.397, 0.285, and 0.234 for 3-, 5-, and 12-
class classication tasks, respectively. The SVM model showed
mean F1 scores of 0.372, 0.238, and 0.202 for respective tasks
(Figure 2df).
DNN as Drug Repurposing Tool. Here we tried to dig a
bit deeper into classication results on pathway level, since the
DNN model worked best with pathways as features. To
determine which of the 12 therapeutic use categories are the
most detectable by DNN, we calculated 10-fold cross-validation
classication accuracy of each category. Antineoplastic agents
turned out to be the most recognizablecategory by a large
margin, with 0.686 accuracy on 12 classes. This was followed by
anti-infective, central nervous system, and dermatologic
categories, with 0.513, 0.506, and 0.505 accuracy, respectively.
The least recognizableon the same number of classes was
hematologic agents, with accuracy of 0.23. On 3- and 5-class
classication problems, the category antineoplastic drugs was
on top as well, with accuracy of 0.82 and 0.742. Separability of
therapeutic categories by DNN can be illustrated with
confusion matrices (Figure 3). Here we observed that the
cardiovascular category drugs was relatively often misclassied
as central nervous system and antineoplastic agents. In contrast,
the level of false positives for the antineoplastic category was
relatively small. If we look even closer into the results,
sometimes these misclassied false positive drugs may in fact
represent a possibility for drug repurposing. For instance, well-
known muscarinic receptor antagonist otenzepad was mis-
classied as central nervous system agent, but despite its
obvious role in brain function,
32,33
according to the MeSH
therapeutic use section, it is only used against cardiac
arrhythmia. Another example includes vasodilator pinacidil, a
cyanoguanidine drug that opens ATP-sensitive potassium
channels, which was misclassied as central nervous system
agent in several cross-validation iterations, although it is used
only in cardiovascular conditions. It is known that potassium
channels play important roles in dierent brain regions,
34
and
Figure 2. Classication results. Classication performance of DNN and SVM trained on signaling pathways (a, b, c) and landmark genes (d, e, f) for
3, 5, and 12 drug classes, respectively, after 10-fold cross validation. Training and validation set results are shown in gray and green colors,
respectively.
Molecular Pharmaceutics Article
DOI: 10.1021/acs.molpharmaceut.6b00248
Mol. Pharmaceutics XXXX, XXX, XXXXXX
C
pinacidil might inuence some of them. Aforementioned cases
hint to the fact that imperfect accuracy here might not be a bad
thing and the DNN model could serve as powerful drug
repositioning tool.
DISCUSSION
With increasing availability of big data and GPU computing, the
entire eld of deep learning is experiencing very rapid
development, and the breadth of DNN applications goes far
beyond text, voice, and image recognition problems. In this
paper we explored the possibility of using DL to classify various
drugs into therapeutic categories solely based on their
transcriptomic data. To our knowledge, this is the rst DL
model to map transcriptomic data onto therapeutical category.
DNN trained on gene level data did not perform very well,
achieving only 0.24 F1 score on 12 classes. Thus, as a way to
reduce dimensionality and keep biological relevance, we
decided to apply pathway activation scoring.
27
Translation of
perturbation proles onto the pathway level turned out to be
very benecial. Pathways served as excellent features, and we
were able to exclude insignicantly perturbed samples and
demonstrate the ability of deep neural network to recognize
Figure 3. Validation confusion matrix representing deep neural network classication performance over a set of drugs proled for A549, MCF7, and
PC3 cell lines, belonging to 3 (a), 5 (b), and 12 (c) therapeutic classes. C(i,j) element is a sample count of how many times i was the truth and j was
predicted.
Molecular Pharmaceutics Article
DOI: 10.1021/acs.molpharmaceut.6b00248
Mol. Pharmaceutics XXXX, XXX, XXXXXX
D
sophisticated drug action mechanisms on the pathway level.
The power of this approach is further highlighted by the fact
that it performs with high accuracy on a pooled data set with
samples from cells treated by dierent drug concentrations and
perturbation times. Furthermore, the DNN achieves signicant
classication accuracy even across dierent cell lines. Its
performance turned out to be better than SVM on every
multiclass classication problem. When we used the same set of
signicantly perturbed samples that we selected with the
pathway activation approach, and trained DNN on a data set
with gene expression data for landmark genes, the results
turned out to be signicantly worse. Hence, we can conclude
that pathway level data is more complementary for DNN and
more suitable for classifying drugs into therapeutic use
categories. Proper comparison to reference group of samples
plays an essential role, and merely normalized gene expression
data from perturbed samples is not sucient for complex
classication tasks.
It is possible to interpret the classication results from
dierent angles. For instance, as it was shown, in confusion
matrices (Figure 3), that the misclassiedsamples for a
certain drug might in fact be an indication of its potential for
novel use, or repurposing, in these exact incorrectlyassigned
conditions. Misclassication, therefore, may lead to unexpected
new discoveries. This approach opens a great avenue for
application of DL in the drug repurposing eld.
MATERIALS AND METHODS
Data Collection. In this study, we performed the analysis of
gene expression data produced by the LINCS Project
participants (http://www.lincsproject.org/). We utilized the
level 3 (Q2NORM) gene expression data for three cell lines:
MCF7, A549, and PC3. Q2NORM data contains the
expression levels of both directly measured landmark tran-
scripts plus inferred genes, which were normalized using
invariant set scaling followed by quantile normalization.
Mapping probes onto ocial HGNC
35
gene symbols resulted
in a gene expression data set comprising 12,797 genes total.
Drug Selection. To link the drugs proled by LINCS
Project to medical conditions, we utilized MeSH (medical
subject headings) classication (https://www.nlm.nih.gov/
mesh/). We picked only those drugs that had a link to a
disease in the therapeutic usesection of the classication tree.
Drugs belonging to several categories simultaneously were
excluded from the analysis.
Gene Expression Analysis. All of the selected drugs
samples collected for three cell lines were grouped by the
combination of the following parameters: cell line, drug,
perturbation concentration, and perturbation time. This
resulted in a total number of 26,420 samples. For gene level
analysis we trained our models on both whole data set of
12,797 genes and a subset of 977 so-called landmark genes
dened in the LINCS Project.
In pathway level analysis, for each given case sample group
we generated a reference group consisting of samples perturbed
with DMSO, that came from the same RNA plate as samples
from the case group. After that, each case sample group was
independently analyzed using an algorithm called Onco-
Finder.
27
Taking the preprocessed gene expression data as an
input, it allows for cross-platform data set comparison with low
error rate and has the ability to obtain functional features of
intracellular regulation using mathematical estimations. For
each investigated sample group it performs a case-reference
comparison using Studentsttest, generates the list of
signicantly dierentially expressed genes, and calculates the
pathway activation strength (PAS), a value which serves as a
qualitative measure of pathway activation. Positive and negative
PAS values indicate pathway up- and downregulation,
respectively. In this study the genes with FDR-adjusted p-
value <0.05 were considered signicantly dierentially ex-
pressed. Samples with zero pathway activation score for all of
the pathways were considered as insignicantly perturbed and
were excluded from further analysis. The ltered data set
contained 308, 454, and 433 drugs for A549, MCF7, and PC3
cell lines, respectively, and comprised 9352 samples total
(Supplementary Tables 1 and 2).
Classication Methods. Among the multitude of available
classication methods we have employed two that are highly
robust and widely successful in elds outside drug prediction:
SVM
36,37
and deep neural network.
38
SVMs are a celebrated
classication method for their exibility and ease of use, while
deep learning approaches are continuing to break records in
many pattern recognition tasks.
Flexibility of SVM, as a maximum margin classier, is in part
reected in provided ability to select a kernel that ts the data
best and choose a soft-margin parameter that allows for best
generalization. However, these parameters are not evident for
any given data set. It has been previously shown that radial basis
function (RBF) kernel SVMs perform well on largely dierent
data. In order to be more objective in selection of kernel we
have allowed our nested cross validation choice of three. We
used grid search for hyperparameter optimization. We have
trained the SVM via nested 3-fold cross validation for
hyperparameters that include kernel type (linear, RBF, or
polynomial) and soft-margin parameter Cembedded in the
outer 10-fold cross-validation loop. For each fold, the algorithm
could have selected dierent kernels and dierent soft-margin
parameters. Nevertheless, RBF was indeed the most preferred.
The deep learning method used in our work was the standard
fully connected multilayer perceptron with 977 input nodes for
gene expression level data and 271 for pathway activation
scores. Similarly to SVM, we used grid search for hyper-
parameter optimization. We used cross entropy as cost function
and AdaDelta
39
as cost function optimizer. We searched for the
optimal number of layers, number of hidden units, and dropout
rejection rate in a nested cross-validation framework. For the
hyperparameter search, the number of layers varied from 3 to 8,
where the number of hidden units per layer was reduced with
the depth of the network to half the previous layer. We set the
search for the starting hidden layer from 300 to 900 in steps of
150. Each layer was initialized with the Glorot uniform
approach.
40
The experiment shows that the best combination
of parameters was 3 hidden layers with 200 in each with
rectied linear activation function. The dropout rejection ratio
was tested for 20% and 80% at each layer. We chose an
antisymmetric activation function, hyperbolic tangent, as the
nonlinear function of hidden neurons because the data is
normalized to zero mean and unit variance, thus we rely on
deviations from the mean to train the network. Also, it has been
reported that the hyperbolic tangent speeds up convergence
compared to sigmoid functions.
39
The number of output nodes
was equal to the number of classes to explore in each particular
experiment with a softmax activation function. The code that
implements the feed-forward neural network used in our
experiments is publicly available at https://github.com/
Molecular Pharmaceutics Article
DOI: 10.1021/acs.molpharmaceut.6b00248
Mol. Pharmaceutics XXXX, XXX, XXXXXX
E
alvarouc/mlp (commit: 8b07a1a18b17ca530fdcb482fce-
c24e26e36b27a).
ASSOCIATED CONTENT
*
SSupporting Information
The Supporting Information is available free of charge on the
ACS Publications website at DOI: 10.1021/acs.molpharma-
ceut.6b00248.
MeSH category stratication binary matrix (XLSX)
Number of drugs selected for A549, MCF7, and PC3 cell
lines (XLSX)
AUTHOR INFORMATION
Corresponding Author
*E-mail: aliper@insilicomedicine.com.
Notes
The authors declare no competing nancial interest.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
We would like to thank Dr. Leslie C. Jellen of Insilico Medicine
for editing this manuscript for language and style. Authors
thank Mark Berger and NVIDIA Corporation for providing
valuable advice and high performance GPU equipment for deep
learning applications.
REFERENCES
(1) Loging, W.; Harland, L.; Williams-Jones, B. High-Throughput
Electronic Biology: Mining Information for Drug Discovery. Nat. Rev.
Drug Discovery 2007,DOI: 10.1038/nrd2345.
(2) Kirchmair, J.; Göller, A. H.; Lang, D.; Kunze, J.; Testa, B.; Wilson,
I. D.; Glen, R. C.; Schneider, G. Predicting Drug Metabolism:
Experiment and/or Computation? Nat. Rev. Drug Discovery 2015,14,
387.
(3) Schirle, M.; Jenkins, J. L. Identifying Compound Efficacy Targets
in Phenotypic Drug Discovery. Drug Discovery Today 2016,21, 82.
(4) LeCun, Y.; Bengio, Y.; Hinton, G. Deep Learning. Nature 2015,
521 (7553), 436444.
(5) Baldi, P.; Sadowski, P.; Whiteson, D. Searching for Exotic
Particles in High-Energy Physics with Deep Learning. Nat. Commun.
2014,5, 4308.
(6) Schmidhuber, J. Deep Learning in Neural Networks: An
Overview. Neural Networks 2015,61,85117.
(7) Mamoshina, P.; Vieira, A.; Putin, E.; Zhavoronkov, A.
Applications of Deep Learning in Biomedicine. Mol. Pharmaceutics
2016,13 (5), 14451454.
(8) Hira, Z. M.; Gillies, D. F. A Review of Feature Selection and
Feature Extraction Methods Applied on Microarray Data. Adv. Bioinf.
2015,2015, 198363.
(9) Ibrahim, R.; Rania, I.; Yousri, N. A.; Ismail, M. A.; El-Makky, N.
M. Multi-Level gene/MiRNA Feature Selection Using Deep Belief
Nets and Active Learning. In 2014 36th Annual International
Conference of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society;
2014.
(10) Fakoor, R.; Ladhak, F.; Nazi, A.; Huber, M. Using Deep Learning
to Enhance Cancer Diagnosis and Classication.InProceedings of the
International Conference on Machine Learning; 2013.
(11) Leung, M. K. K.; Xiong, H. Y.; Lee, L. J.; Frey, B. J. Deep
Learning of the Tissue-Regulated Splicing Code. Bioinformatics 2014,
30 (12), i121i129.
(12) Lyons, J.; Dehzangi, A.; Heffernan, R.; Sharma, A.; Paliwal, K.;
Sattar, A.; Zhou, Y.; Yang, Y. Predicting Backbone CαAngles and
Dihedrals from Protein Sequences by Stacked Sparse Auto-Encoder
Deep Neural Network. J. Comput. Chem. 2014,35 (28), 20402046.
(13) Wang, S.; Weng, S.; Ma, J.; Tang, Q. DeepCNF-D: Predicting
Protein Order/Disorder Regions by Weighted Deep Convolutional
Neural Fields. Int. J. Mol. Sci. 2015,16 (8), 1731517330.
(14) Lusci, A.; Pollastri, G.; Baldi, P. Deep Architectures and Deep
Learning in Chemoinformatics: The Prediction of Aqueous Solubility
for Drug-like Molecules. J. Chem. Inf. Model. 2013,53 (7), 15631575.
(15) Wang, C.; Caihua, W.; Juan, L.; Fei, L.; Yafang, T.; Zixin, D.;
Qian-Nan, H. Pairwise Input Neural Network for Target-Ligand
Interaction Prediction.In2014 IEEE International Conference on
Bioinformatics and Biomedicine (BIBM); 2014.
(16) Hughes, T. B.; Miller, G. P.; Swamidass, S. J. Modeling
Epoxidation of Drug-like Molecules with a Deep Machine Learning
Network. ACS Cent. Sci. 2015,1(4), 168180.
(17) Xu, Y.; Dai, Z.; Chen, F.; Gao, S.; Pei, J.; Lai, L. Deep Learning
for Drug-Induced Liver Injury. J. Chem. Inf. Model. 2015,55 (10),
20852093.
(18) Solovyeva, K. P.; Karandashev, I. M.; Zhavoronkov, A.; Dunin-
Barkowski, W. L. Models of Innate Neural Attractors and Their
Applications for Neural Information Processing. Front. Syst. Neurosci.
2015,DOI: 10.3389/fnsys.2015.00178.
(19) Newby, D.; Freitas, A. A.; Ghafourian, T. Comparing Multilabel
Classification Methods for Provisional Biopharmaceutics Class
Prediction. Mol. Pharmaceutics 2015,12 (1), 87102.
(20) Wenlock, M. C.; Barton, P. In Silico Physicochemical Parameter
Predictions. Mol. Pharmaceutics 2013,10 (4), 12241235.
(21) Broccatelli, F.; Cruciani, G.; Benet, L. Z.; Oprea, T. I. BDDCS
Class Prediction for New Molecular Entities. Mol. Pharmaceutics 2012,
9(3), 570580.
(22) Herrera-Ruiz, D.; Faria, T. N.; Bhardwaj, R. K.; Timoszyk, J.;
Gudmundsson, O. S.; Moench, P.; Wall, D. A.; Smith, R. L.; Knipp, G.
T. A Novel hPepT1 Stably Transfected Cell Line: Establishing a
Correlation between Expression and Function. Mol. Pharmaceutics
2004,1(2), 136144.
(23) Iskar, M.; Zeller, G.; Blattmann, P.; Campillos, M.; Kuhn, M.;
Kaminska, K. H.; Runz, H.; Gavin, A.-C.; Pepperkok, R.; van Noort,
V.; Bork, P. Characterization of Drug-Induced Transcriptional
Modules: Towards Drug Repositioning and Functional Under-
standing. Mol. Syst. Biol. 2013,9, 662.
(24) Kutalik, Z.; Beckmann, J. S.; Bergmann, S. A Modular Approach
for Integrative Analysis of Large-Scale Gene-Expression and Drug-
Response Data. Nat. Biotechnol. 2008,26 (5), 531539.
(25) Spirin, P. V.; Lebedev, T. D.; Orlova, N. N.; Gornostaeva, A. S.;
Prokofjeva, M. M.; Nikitenko, N. A.; Dmitriev, S. E.; Buzdin, A. A.;
Borisov, N. M.; Aliper, A. M.; Garazha, A. V.; Rubtsov, P. M.; Stocking,
C.; Prassolov, V. S. Silencing AML1-ETO Gene Expression Leads to
Simultaneous Activation of Both pro-Apoptotic and Proliferation
Signaling. Leukemia 2014,28 (11), 22222228.
(26) Zhu, Q.; Izumchenko, E.; Aliper, A. M.; Makarev, E.; Paz, K.;
Buzdin, A. A.; Zhavoronkov, A. A.; Sidransky, D. Pathway Activation
Strength Is a Novel Independent Prognostic Biomarker for Cetuximab
Sensitivity in Colorectal Cancer Patients. Hum. Genome Var. 2015,2,
15009.
(27) Buzdin, A. A.; Zhavoronkov, A. A.; Korzinkin, M. B.; Venkova,
L. S.; Zenin, A. A.; Smirnov, P. Y.; Borisov, N. M. Oncofinder, a new
method for the analysis of intracellular signaling pathway activation
using transcriptomic data. Front. Genet. 2014,5, 55.
(28) Artemov, A.; Aliper, A.; Korzinkin, M.; Lezhnina, K.; Jellen, L.;
Zhukov, N.; Roumiantsev, S.; Gaifullin, N.; Zhavoronkov, A.; Borisov,
N.; Buzdin, A. A Method for Predicting Target Drug Efficiency in
Cancer Based on the Analysis of Signaling Pathway Activation.
Oncotarget 2015,6(30), 2934729356.
(29) Venkova, L.; Aliper, A.; Suntsova, M.; Kholodenko, R.; Shepelin,
D.; Borisov, N.; Malakhova, G.; Vasilov, R.; Roumiantsev, S.;
Zhavoronkov, A.; Buzdin, A. Combinatorial High-Throughput
Experimental and Bioinformatic Approach Identifies Molecular
Pathways Linked with the Sensitivity to Anticancer Target Drugs.
Oncotarget 2015,6(29), 2722727238.
(30) Makarev, E.; Cantor, C.; Zhavoronkov, A.; Buzdin, A.; Aliper,
A.; Csoka, A. B. Pathway Activation Profiling Reveals New Insights
Molecular Pharmaceutics Article
DOI: 10.1021/acs.molpharmaceut.6b00248
Mol. Pharmaceutics XXXX, XXX, XXXXXX
F
into Age-Related Macular Degeneration and Provides Avenues for
Therapeutic Interventions. Aging 2014,6(12), 10641075.
(31) Combrisson, E.; Jerbi, K. Exceeding Chance Level by Chance:
The Caveat of Theoretical Chance Levels in Brain Signal Classification
and Statistical Assessment of Decoding Accuracy. J. Neurosci. Methods
2015,250, 126136.
(32) Langmead, C. J.; Watson, J.; Reavill, C. Muscarinic Acetylcho-
line Receptors as CNS Drug Targets. Pharmacol. Ther. 2008,117 (2),
232243.
(33) Volpicelli, L. A.; Levey, A. I. Muscarinic Acetylcholine Receptor
Subtypes in Cerebral Cortex and Hippocampus. Prog. Brain Res. 2004,
145,5966.
(34) Trimmer, J. S. Subcellular Localization of K+ Channels in
Mammalian Brain Neurons: Remarkable Precision in the Midst of
Extraordinary Complexity. Neuron 2015,85 (2), 238256.
(35) Gray, K. A.; Yates, B.; Seal, R. L.; Wright, M. W.; Bruford, E. A.
Genenames.org: The HGNC Resources in 2015. Nucleic Acids Res.
2015,43 (D1), D1079D1085.
(36) Boser, B. E.; Guyon, I. M.; Vapnik, V. N. A Training Algorithm
for Optimal Margin Classifiers. Proc. 5th Annu. Workshop Comput.
Learn. Theory - COLT 92 1992, 144.
(37) Cortes, C.; Vapnik, V. Support-Vector Networks. Mach. Learn.
1995,20 (3), 273297.
(38) Hinton, G. E.; Salakhutdinov, R. R. Reducing the Dimension-
ality of Data with Neural Networks. Science 2006,313 (5786), 504
507.
(39) Zeiler, M. D. ADADELTA: An Adaptive Learning Rate Method
arXiv 2012,6.
(40) Glorot, X.; Bengio, Y. Understanding the difficulty of training
deep feedforward neural networks. Int. Conf. Artif. Intell. Stat. 2010,
249256.
Molecular Pharmaceutics Article
DOI: 10.1021/acs.molpharmaceut.6b00248
Mol. Pharmaceutics XXXX, XXX, XXXXXX
G
... [11] Despite challenges such as regulatory hurdles and intellectual property issues, interdisciplinary collaboration and technological innovation signal a bright future for drug repurposing, with potential improvements in patient care and public health outcomes. [12] ...
... [3] Repurposing aligns with sustainability principles by minimizing the need for new chemical synthesis and reducing pharmaceutical waste, optimizing resource utilization. [12] Moreover, drug repurposing broadens clinicians' therapeutic options, particularly in disease areas with limited alternatives, quickly bringing additional treatment options to patients. [6] In summary, drug repurposing offers numerous advantages in clinical trials, including accelerated timelines, reduced costs, increased success probabilities, expanded therapeutic options, streamlined regulatory processes, and improved patient access, ultimately enhancing health-care outcomes. ...
... Since repurposed drugs have known safety profiles, participants are less likely to experience adverse effects or unforeseen complications during the trial period, enhancing their overall experience and compliance. [12] By maximizing the utility of existing drugs, drug repurposing promotes sustainable health-care practices. ...
Article
Full-text available
This review article, titled "Drug Repurposing: Clinical Practices and Regulatory Pathways," explores the innovative approach of using existing drugs for new therapeutic purposes. It provides a comprehensive analysis of the clinical applications, highlighting the potential benefits and challenges of repurposed drugs in healthcare. The article also delves into the regulatory pathways involved, discussing how these frameworks impact the approval and use of repurposed drugs. With a focus on bridging gaps in current treatment strategies, the review aims to inform healthcare professionals and researchers about the evolving landscape of drug repurposing in clinical practice.
... Hyperparameters significantly affect the predictive performance of neural network models. Three-fold cross-validation with random search was used to determine the optimal hyperparameters (Cheng, Wang & He, 2021;Aliper et al., 2016;Rimal & Sharma, 2023). During training, the batch size was selected from [16,32,64,128,256], the number of iterations from [10,20,30,50,100], the dropout probability from [0.1, 0.3, 0.5, 0.7], and the learning rate from [0.0001, 0.001, 0.01]. ...
... In many cases, these imaging modalities generate high-dimensional data, and directly combining all the features could lead to challenges related to the curse of dimensionality. The curse of dimensionality refers to the increased complexity and computational demands as the number of features or dimensions grows (Aliper et al. 2016). By extracting DL scores and radiomic scores separately from the two imaging modalities, the study aimed to capture the essential information and patterns present in each modality independently. ...
Article
Full-text available
In breast cancer research, diverse data types and formats, such as radiological images, clinical records, histological data, and expression analysis, are employed. Given the intricate nature of natural phenomena, relying on the features of a single modality is seldom sufficient for comprehensive analysis. Therefore, it is possible to guarantee medical relevance and achieve improved clinical outcomes by combining several modalities. The presen study carefully maps and reviews 47 primary articles from six well-known digital libraries that were published between 2018 and 2023 for breast cancer classification based on multimodal deep learning fusion (MDLF) techniques. This systematic literature review encompasses various aspects, including the medical modalities combined, the datasets utilized in these studies, the techniques, models, and architectures used in MDLF and it also discusses the advantages and limitations of each approach. The analysis of selected papers has revealed a compelling trend: the emergence of new modalities and combinations that were previously unexplored in the context of breast cancer classification. This exploration has not only expanded the scope of predictive models but also introduced fresh perspectives for addressing diverse targets, ranging from screening to diagnosis and prognosis. The practical advantages of MDLF are evident in its ability to enhance the predictive capabilities of machine learning models, resulting in improved accuracy across diverse applications. The prevalence of deep learning models underscores their success in autonomously discerning complex patterns, offering a substantial departure from traditional machine learning approaches. Furthermore, the paper explores the challenges and future directions in this field, including the need for larger datasets, the use of ensemble learning methods, and the interpretation of multimodal models.
... Current computational methods for drug discovery and repurposing encompass a variety of approaches, including disease-centric, target-centric, and drug-centric strategies, with virtual screening (VS) being the most used in silico tool to search for repurposing opportunities so far [9]. In silico methods enable to set relationships between different types of data to create new information and knowledge that enhances pattern recognition and predictive capabilities through machine learning tools like deep neural networks [10,11]. Additionally, such algorithms have been highlighted in drug repurposing for diseases like COVID-19, emphasizing the re-evaluation of existing drugs and the biological and computational interpretation of AI-guided repurposing [12]. ...
Article
Full-text available
Repurposing utilizes existing drugs with known safety profiles and discovers new uses by combining experimental and computational approaches. The integration of computational methods has greatly advanced drug repurposing, offering a rational approach and reducing the risk of failure in these efforts. Recognizing the potential for drug repurposing, we employed our Iterative Stochastic Elimination (ISE) algorithm to screen known drugs from the DrugBank database. Repurposing in our hands is based on computer models of the actions of ligands: the ISE algorithm is a machine learning tool that creates ligand-based models by distinguishing between the physicochemical properties of known drugs and those of decoys. The models are large sets of “filters” made out, each, of molecular properties. We screen and score external sets of molecules (in our case- the DrugBank molecules) by our agonism and antagonism models based on published data (i.e., IC50, Ki, or EC50) and pick the top-scoring molecules as candidates for experiments. Such agonist and antagonist models for six G-protein coupled receptors (GPCRs) families facilitated the identification of repurposing opportunities. Our screening revealed 5982 new potential molecular actions (agonists, antagonists), which suggest repurposing candidates for the cannabinoid 2 (CB2), histamine (H1, H3, and H4), and dopamine 3 (D3) receptors, which may be useful to treat conditions such as neuroinflammation, obesity, allergic dermatitis, and drug abuse. These sets of best candidates should now be examined by experimentalists: based on previous such experiments, there is a very high chance of discovering novel highly bioactive molecules.
... Moreover, AI and ML are playing a pivotal role in accelerating drug discovery and development in oncology [86]. By analyzing large-scale genomic and pharmacological datasets, ML algorithms can identify novel drug targets, predict drug response, and optimize drug combinations [87]. For instance, AI-driven drug screening platforms have been used to identify repurposed drugs with anti-cancer properties, expediting the translation of existing therapies into new indications [88]. ...
Article
Full-text available
Recent decades have witnessed remarkable advancements in the field of oncology, with innovations spanning from novel immunotherapies to precision medicine approaches tailored to individual tumor profiles. This comprehensive literature review explores emerging trends in oncology, encompassing diverse topics such as the genomic landscape of cancer, the advent of liquid biopsies for non-invasive diagnostics, and the intricate interplay between cancer cells and the tumor microenvironment. Additionally, this review delves into the transformative potential of artificial intelligence and machine learning in cancer research and clinical decision-making. Furthermore, it addresses critical issues including cancer epidemiology, disparities in access to care, and strategies for optimizing cancer survivorship and quality of life. By synthesizing recent research findings and highlighting key developments, this review aims to provide a holistic perspective on the evolving landscape of oncology, offering insights that may guide future research directions and enhance patient care outcomes.
Article
The world faces the ongoing challenge of terrorism and extremism, which threaten the stability of nations, the security of their citizens, and the integrity of political, economic, and social systems. Given the complexity and multifaceted nature of this phenomenon, combating it requires a collective effort, with tailored methods to address its various aspects. Identifying the terrorist organization responsible for an attack is a critical step in combating terrorism. Historical data plays a pivotal role in this process, providing insights that can inform prevention and response strategies. With advancements in technology and artificial intelligence (AI), particularly in military applications, there is growing interest in utilizing these developments to enhance national and regional security against terrorism. Central to this effort are terrorism databases, which serve as rich resources for data on armed organizations, extremist entities, and terrorist incidents. The Global Terrorism Database (GTD) stands out as one of the most widely used and accessible resources for researchers. Recent progress in machine learning (ML), deep learning (DL), and natural language processing (NLP) offers promising avenues for improving the identification and classification of terrorist organizations. This study introduces a framework designed to classify and predict terrorist groups using bidirectional recurrent units and self-attention mechanisms, referred to as BiGRU-SA. This approach utilizes the comprehensive data in the GTD by integrating textual features extracted by DistilBERT with features that show a high correlation with terrorist organizations. Additionally, the Synthetic Minority Over-sampling Technique with Tomek links (SMOTE-T) was employed to address data imbalance and enhance the robustness of our predictions. The BiGRU-SA model captures temporal dependencies and contextual information within the data. By processing data sequences in both forward and reverse directions, BiGRU-SA offers a comprehensive view of the temporal dynamics, significantly enhancing classification accuracy. To evaluate the effectiveness of our framework, we compared ten models, including six traditional ML models and four DL algorithms. The proposed BiGRU-SA framework demonstrated outstanding performance in classifying 36 terrorist organizations responsible for terrorist attacks, achieving an accuracy of 98.68%, precision of 96.06%, sensitivity of 96.83%, specificity of 99.50%, and a Matthews correlation coefficient of 97.50%. Compared to state-of-the-art methods, the proposed model outperformed others, confirming its effectiveness and accuracy in the classification and prediction of terrorist organizations.
Chapter
This chapter highlights how crucial it is to explore the use of AI applications in businesses nowadays, analyze how AI is being utilized to drive digital transformation, and what that means for the business environment going forward. Additionally, it evaluates the advantages and difficulties of AI as it relates to corporate technology change. Data were collected and analyzed from different scholarly sources, such as books, articles, and websites. Study findings claimed that the application of AI has grown significantly across a range of sectors, including manufacturing, telecommunications, healthcare, banking, education, retail, and e-commerce. Simplifying procedures, facilitating better decision-making, and increasing productivity are just a few of the ways artificial intelligence (AI) is thought to have significantly improved company operations. By leveraging AI's full potential, businesses can rise to a more advantageous position in the market, foster creativity, and innovation, increase productivity, and provide better customer experiences.
Article
Full-text available
The field of drug discovery and development has experienced a transformative shift with the integration of Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies. This abstract provides an overview of the significant role AI plays in revolutionizing the traditional drug discovery process. As pharmaceutical research faces challenges such as escalating costs, lengthy timelines, and high failure rates, AI emerges as a powerful tool to expedite and enhance various stages of drug development. AI applications in drug discovery begin with the identification of potential drug targets. Machine learning algorithms analyze vast biological datasets to predict disease-related molecular targets and pathways, accelerating the initial phase of research. Furthermore, AI-driven virtual screening helps identify promising drug candidates from large chemical libraries, saving time and resources in the early stages of drug development. In the subsequent stages, AI facilitates the optimization of drug candidates by predicting their pharmacokinetic and toxicity profiles. Through advanced computational models, AI contributes to the design of molecules with improved efficacy and safety, reducing the likelihood of late-stage failures. Additionally, AI-driven predictive modeling aids in patient stratification, allowing for personalized treatment approaches that enhance clinical trial success rates. The integration of AI in clinical trials brings forth significant improvements in patient recruitment, monitoring, and data analysis. AI algorithms analyze patient data to identify suitable candidates, predict potential adverse events, and optimize trial protocols. Real-time monitoring of patient responses through wearable devices and continuous data analysis enhance the efficiency and reliability of clinical trials. As drug development progresses, AI supports post-market surveillance by analyzing real-world evidence and monitoring the long-term safety and effectiveness of pharmaceutical products. This proactive approach to pharmacovigilance ensures the ongoing safety of drugs in the market. In conclusion, the role of Artificial Intelligence in drug discovery and development is pivotal, transforming the pharmaceutical landscape. AI expedites target identification, accelerates virtual screening, optimizes drug candidates, and improves patient stratification, leading to more efficient and cost-effective drug development processes. The integration of AI technologies not only addresses current challenges but also holds the promise of uncovering novel therapeutic solutions and advancing precision medicine in the years to come.
Article
Full-text available
Intrinsically disordered proteins or protein regions are involved in key biological processes including regulation of transcription, signal transduction, and alternative splicing. Accurately predicting order/disorder regions ab initio from the protein sequence is a prerequisite step for further analysis of functions and mechanisms for these disordered regions. This work presents a learning method, weighted DeepCNF (Deep Convolutional Neural Fields), to improve the accuracy of order/disorder prediction by exploiting the long-range sequential information and the interdependency between adjacent order/disorder labels and by assigning different weights for each label during training and prediction to solve the label imbalance issue. Evaluated by the CASP9 and CASP10 targets, our method obtains 0.855 and 0.898 AUC values, which are higher than the state-of-the-art single ab initio predictors.
Article
Full-text available
A new generation of anticancer therapeutics called target drugs has quickly developed in the 21st century. These drugs are tailored to inhibit cancer cell growth, proliferation, and viability by specific interactions with one or a few target proteins. However, despite formally known molecular targets for every "target" drug, patient response to treatment remains largely individual and unpredictable. Choosing the most effective personalized treatment remains a major challenge in oncology and is still largely trial and error. Here we present a novel approach for predicting target drug efficacy based on the gene expression signature of the individual tumor sample(s). The enclosed bioinformatic algorithm detects activation of intracellular regulatory pathways in the tumor in comparison to the corresponding normal tissues. According to the nature of the molecular targets of a drug, it predicts whether the drug can prevent cancer growth and survival in each individual case by blocking the abnormally activated tumor-promoting pathways or by reinforcing internal tumor suppressor cascades. To validate the method, we compared the distribution of predicted drug efficacy scores for five drugs (Sorafenib, Bevacizumab, Cetuximab, Sorafenib, Imatinib, Sunitinib) and seven cancer types (Clear Cell Renal Cell Carcinoma, Colon cancer, Lung adenocarcinoma, non-Hodgkin Lymphoma, Thyroid cancer and Sarcoma) with the available clinical trials data for the respective cancer types and drugs. The percent of responders to a drug treatment correlated significantly (Pearson's correlation 0.77 p = 0.023) with the percent of tumors showing high drug scores calculated with the current algorithm.
Article
Full-text available
Effective choice of anticancer drugs is important problem of modern medicine. We developed a method termed OncoFinder for the analysis of new type of biomarkers reflecting activation of intracellular signaling and metabolic molecular pathways. These biomarkers may be linked with the sensitivity to anticancer drugs. In this study, we compared the experimental data obtained in our laboratory and in the Genomics of Drug Sensitivity in Cancer (GDS) project for testing response to anticancer drugs and transcriptomes of various human cell lines. The microarray-based profiling of transcriptomes was performed for the cell lines before the addition of drugs to the medium, and experimental growth inhibition curves were built for each drug, featuring characteristic IC50 values. We assayed here four target drugs - Pazopanib, Sorafenib, Sunitinib and Temsirolimus, and 238 different cell lines, of which 11 were profiled in our laboratory and 227 - in GDS project. Using the OncoFinder-processed transcriptomic data on ~600 molecular pathways, we identified pathways showing significant correlation between pathway activation strength (PAS) and IC50 values for these drugs. Correlations reflect relationships between response to drug and pathway activation features. We intersected the results and found molecular pathways significantly correlated in both our assay and GDS project. For most of these pathways, we generated molecular models of their interaction with known molecular target(s) of the respective drugs. For the first time, our study uncovered mechanisms underlying cancer cell response to drugs at the high-throughput molecular interactomic level.
Article
Thesupport-vector network is a new learning machine for two-group classification problems. The machine conceptually implements the following idea: input vectors are non-linearly mapped to a very high-dimension feature space. In this feature space a linear decision surface is constructed. Special properties of the decision surface ensures high generalization ability of the learning machine. The idea behind the support-vector network was previously implemented for the restricted case where the training data can be separated without errors. We here extend this result to non-separable training data.High generalization ability of support-vector networks utilizing polynomial input transformations is demonstrated. We also compare the performance of the support-vector network to various classical learning algorithms that all took part in a benchmark study of Optical Character Recognition.
Article
Increases in throughput and installed base of biomedical research equipment led to a massive accumulation of -omics data known to be highly variable, high-dimensional, and sourced from multiple often incompatible data platforms. While this data may be useful for biomarker identification and drug discovery, the bulk of it remains underutilized. Deep neural networks (DNNs) are efficient algorithms based on the use of compositional layers of neurons, with advantages well matched to the challenges -omics data presents. While achieving state-of-the-art results and even surpassing human accuracy in many challenging tasks, the adoption of deep learning in biomedicine has been comparatively slow. Here, we discuss key features of deep learning that may give this approach an edge over other machine learning methods. We then consider limitations and review a number of applications of deep learning in biomedical studies demonstrating proof of concept and practical utility.
Article
Prediction the interactions between proteins (targets) and small molecules (ligands) is a critical task for the drug discovery in silico. In this work, we consider the target binding site instead of the whole target and propose a pairwise input neural network (PINN) for constructing the site-ligand interaction prediction model. Different with the ordinary artificial neural network (ANN) with one vector as input, the proposed PINN can accept a pair of vectors as the input, corresponding to a binding site and a ligand respectively. The 5-CV evaluation results show that PINN outperforms other representative target-ligand interaction prediction methods.
Article
Drug-induced liver injury (DILI) has been the single most frequent cause of safety-related drug marketing withdrawals for the past 50 years. Recently, deep learning (DL) has been successfully applied in many fields due to its exceptional and automatic learning ability. In this study, DILI prediction models were developed using DL architectures, and the best model trained on 475 drugs predicted an external validation set of 198 drugs with an accuracy of 86.9%, sensitivity of 82.5%, specificity of 92.9%, and area under the curve of 0.955, which is better than the performance of previously described DILI prediction models. Furthermore, with deep analysis, we also identified important molecular features that are related to DILI. Such DL models could improve the prediction of DILI risk in humans. The DL DILI prediction models are freely available at http://mdl.pku.edu.cn/DILIserver/DILI_home.php.