Network-principled deep generative models for designing drug combinations as graph sets
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Combination therapy has shown to improve therapeutic efficacy while reducing side effects. Importantly, it has become an indispensable strategy to overcome resistance in antibiotics, anti-microbials, and anti-cancer drugs. Facing enormous chemical space and unclear design principles for small-molecule combinations, the computational drug-combination design has not seen generative models to meet its potential to accelerate resistance-overcoming drug combination discovery. We have developed the first deep generative model for drug combination design, by jointly embedding graph-structured domain knowledge and iteratively training a reinforcement learning-based chemical graph-set designer. First, we have developed Hierarchical Variational Graph Auto-Encoders (HVGAE) trained end-to-end to jointly embed gene-gene, gene-disease, and disease-disease networks. Novel attentional pooling is introduced here for learning disease-representations from associated genes' representations. Second, targeting diseases in learned representations, we have recast the drug-combination design problem as graph-set generation and developed a deep learning-based model with novel rewards. Specifically, besides chemical validity rewards, we have introduced a novel generative adversarial award, being generalized sliced Wasserstein, for chemically diverse molecules with distributions similar to known drugs. We have also designed a network principle-based reward for drug combinations. Numerical results indicate that, compared to graph embedding methods, HVGAE learns more informative and generalizable disease representations. Case studies on four diseases show that network-principled drug combinations tend to have low toxicity. The generated drug combinations collectively cover the disease module similar to FDA-approved drug combinations and could potentially suggest novel systems-pharmacology strategies.
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