Matrix Factorization-based Technique for Drug Repurposing Predictions

Classical drug design methodologies are hugely costly and time-consuming, with approximately 85% of the new proposed molecules failing in the first three phases of the FDA drug approval process. Thus, strategies to find alternative indications for already approved drugs that leverage computational methods are of crucial relevance. We previously demonstrated the efficacy of the Non-negative Matrix Tri-Factorization, a method that allows exploiting both data integration and machine learning, to infer novel indications for approved drugs. In this work, we present an innovative enhancement of the NMTF method that consists of a shortest-path evaluation of drug-protein pairs using the protein-to-protein interaction network. This approach allows inferring novel protein targets that were never considered as drug targets before, increasing the information fed to the NMTF method. Indeed, this novel advance enables the investigation of drug-centric predictions, simultaneously identifying therapeutic classes, protein targets and diseases associated with a particular drug. To test our methodology, we applied the NMTF and shortest-path enhancement methods to an outdated collection of data and compared the predictions against the most updated version, obtaining very good performance, with an Average Precision Score of 0.82. The data enhancement strategy allowed increasing the number of putative protein targets from 3,691 to 15,295, while the predictive performance of the method is slightly increased. Finally, we also validated our top-scored predictions according to the literature, finding relevant confirmation of predicted interactions between drugs and protein targets, as well as of predicted annotations between drugs and both therapeutic classes and diseases.