Hybrid Dual-Context Prompted Cross-Attention Framework with Language Model Guidance for Multi-Label Prediction of Human Off-Target Ligand–Protein Interactions
Abdullah, Zulaikha Fatima, Muhammad Ateeb Ather, Liliana Chanona-Hernández, José Luis Oropeza Rodríguez · International Journal of Molecular Sciences · 2026
Accurately identifying drug off-targets is essential for reducing toxicity and improving the success rate of pharmaceutical discovery pipelines. However, current deep learning approaches often struggle to fuse chemical structure, protein biology, and multi-target context. Here, we introduce HDPC-LGT (Hybrid Dual-Prompt Cross-Attention Ligand-Protein Graph Transformer), a framework designed to predict ligand binding across sixteen human translation-related proteins clinically associated with antibiotic toxicity. HDPC-LGT combines graph-based chemical reasoning with protein language model embeddings and structural priors to capture biologically meaningful ligand-protein interactions. The model was trained on 216,482 experimentally validated ligand-protein pairs from the Chemical Database of Bioactive Molecules (ChEMBL) and the Protein-Ligand Binding Database (BindingDB) and evaluated using scaffold-level, protein-level, and combined holdout strategies. HDPC-LGT achieves a macro receiver operating characteristic-area under the curve (macro ROC-AUC) of 0.996 and a micro F1-score (micro F1) of 0.989, outperforming Deep Drug-Target Affinity Model (DeepDTA), Graph-based Drug-Target Affinity Model (GraphDTA), Molecule-Protein Interaction Transformer (MolTrans), Cross-Attention Transformer for Drug-Target Interaction (CAT-DTI), and Heterogeneous Graph Transformer for Drug-Target Affinity (HGT-DTA) by 3-7%. External validation using the Papyrus universal bioactivity resource (Papyrus), the Protein Data Bank binding subset (PDBbind), and the benchmark Yamanishi dataset confirms strong generalisation to unseen chemotypes and proteins. HDPC-LGT also provides biologically interpretable outputs: cross-attention maps, Integrated Gradients (IG), and Gradient-weighted Class Activation Mapping (Grad-CAM) highlight catalytic residues in aminoacyl-tRNA synthetases (aaRSs), ribosomal tunnel regions, and pharmacophoric interaction patterns, aligning with known biochemical mechanisms. By integrating multimodal biochemical information with deep learning, HDPC-LGT offers a practical tool for off-target toxicity prediction, structure-based lead optimisation, and polypharmacology research, with potential applications in antibiotic development, safety profiling, and rational compound redesign.