Machine learning for synergistic network pharmacology: a comprehensive overview

Abstract Network pharmacology is an emerging area of systematic drug research that attempts to understand drug actions and interactions with multiple targets. Network pharmacology has changed the paradigm from ‘one-target one-drug’ to highly potent ‘multi-target drug’. Despite that, this synergistic approach is currently facing many challenges particularly mining effective information such as drug targets, mechanism of action, and drug and organism interaction from massive, heterogeneous data. To overcome bottlenecks in multi-target drug discovery, computational algorithms are highly welcomed by scientific community. Machine learning (ML) and especially its subfield deep learning (DL) have seen impressive advances. Techniques developed within these fields are now able to analyze and learn from huge amounts of data in disparate formats. In terms of network pharmacology, ML can improve discovery and decision making from big data. Opportunities to apply ML occur in all stages of network pharmacology research. Examples include screening of biologically active small molecules, target identification, metabolic pathways identification, protein–protein interaction network analysis, hub gene analysis and finding binding affinity between compounds and target proteins. This review summarizes the premier algorithmic concepts of ML in network pharmacology and forecasts future opportunities, potential applications as well as several remaining challenges of implementing ML in network pharmacology. To our knowledge, this study provides the first comprehensive assessment of ML approaches in network pharmacology, and we hope that it encourages additional efforts toward the development and acceptance of network pharmacology in the pharmaceutical industry.