Understanding Multivariate Drug-Target-DiseaseInterdependence via Event-Graph
Jingwei Qu, Bei Wang, Zhixun Li, Xiaoqing Lyu, Zhi Tang · 2021 IEEE International Conference on Bioinformatics and Biomedicine (BIBM) · 2021
Drug repurposing aims at identifying new indications for approved drugs that are outside the scope of the original indications. Understanding the acting mechanism among drugs, protein targets, and diseases, especially the interdependent and indecomposable relationships, is a critical step. However, most existing methods rely on pairwise relationships. To model the biological interactions between the three types of entities, which are likely ignored by the pairwise paradigm, we propose an end-to-end Event-Graph Neural Network (EGNN) to predict multivariate relationships of drugs, targets, and diseases for drug repurposing. Specifically, we introduce the event to describe the interdependence of drug-target-disease as a complete semantic unit and design the Event-Graph to model the multivariate relationships. To predict the potential relationships, we perform the representation learning on the Event-Graph by a bidirectional aggregating operation and an event-level attention mechanism. Experimental results on real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness and promising performance of EGNN compared with several competitive methods.