Graph convolutional networks for drug response prediction

Abstract Background Drug response prediction is an important problem in computational personalized medicine. Many machine-learning-based methods, especially deep learning-based ones, have been proposed for this task. However, these methods often represent the drugs as strings, which are not a natural way to depict molecules. Also, interpretation (e.g., what are the mutation or copy number aberration contributing to the drug response) has not been considered thoroughly. Methods In this study, we propose a novel method, GraphDRP, based on graph convolutional network for the problem. In GraphDRP, drugs were represented in molecular graphs directly capturing the bonds among atoms, meanwhile cell lines were depicted as binary vectors of genomic aberrations. Representative features of drugs and cell lines were learned by convolution layers, then combined to represent for each drug-cell line pair. Finally, the response value of each drug-cell line pair was predicted by a fully-connected neural network. Four variants of graph convolutional networks were used for learning the features of drugs. Results We found that GraphDRP outperforms tCNNS in all performance measures for all experiments. Also, through saliency maps of the resulting GraphDRP models, we discovered the contribution of the genomic aberrations to the responses. Conclusion Representing drugs as graphs can improve the performance of drug response prediction. Availability of data and materials Data and source code can be downloaded at https://github.com/hauldhut/GraphDRP .