SynPathy: Predicting Drug Synergy through Drug-Associated Pathways Using Deep Learning

Abstract

Drug combination therapy has become a promising therapeutic strategy for cancer treatment. While high-throughput drug combination screening is effective for identifying synergistic drug combinations, measuring all possible combinations is impractical due to the vast space of therapeutic agents and cell lines. In this study, we propose a biologically-motivated deep learning approach to identify pathway-level features from drug and cell lines' molecular data for predicting drug synergy and quantifying the interactions in synergistic drug pairs. This method obtained an MSE of 70.6 ± 6.4, significantly surpassing previous approaches while providing potential candidate pathways to explain the prediction. We further demonstrate that drug combinations tend to be more synergistic when their top contributing pathways are closer to each other on a protein interaction network, suggesting a potential strategy for combination therapy with topologically interacting pathways. Our computational approach can thus be utilized both for prescreening of potential drug combinations and for designing new combinations based on proximity of pathways associated with drug targets and cell lines.

Implications:

Our computational framework may be translated in the future to clinical scenarios where synergistic drugs are tailored to the patient and additionally, drug development could benefit from designing drugs that target topologically close pathways.