Drug Synergy Prediction via Residual Graph Isomorphism Networks and Attention Mechanisms

📅 2026-04-23
📈 Citations: 0
Influential: 0
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🤖 AI Summary
Traditional monotherapy often suffers from limited efficacy and rapid development of drug resistance, while experimental screening of drug combinations is prohibitively expensive, necessitating efficient computational approaches to predict synergistic effects. This work proposes ResGIN-Att, a novel model that integrates drug molecular structures, cell line genomic profiles, and inter-drug interactions. It employs a residual graph isomorphism network to capture multi-scale topological features and mitigate over-smoothing, combines an adaptive LSTM to aggregate structural information from local to global levels, and introduces a cross-attention mechanism to explicitly model drug–drug interactions and identify critical substructures. Evaluated on five public datasets, the method significantly outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, demonstrating superior generalization and robustness.

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📝 Abstract
In the treatment of complex diseases, treatment regimens using a single drug often yield limited efficacy and can lead to drug resistance. In contrast, combination drug therapies can significantly improve therapeutic outcomes through synergistic effects. However, experimentally validating all possible drug combinations is prohibitively expensive, underscoring the critical need for efficient computational prediction methods. Although existing approaches based on deep learning and graph neural networks (GNNs) have made considerable progress, challenges remain in reducing structural bias, improving generalization capability, and enhancing model interpretability. To address these limitations, this paper proposes a collaborative prediction graph neural network that integrates molecular structural features and cell-line genomic profiles with drug-drug interactions to enhance the prediction of synergistic effects. We introduce a novel model named the Residual Graph Isomorphism Network integrated with an Attention mechanism (ResGIN-Att). The model first extracts multi scale topological features of drug molecules using a residual graph isomorphism network, where residual connections help mitigate over-smoothing in deep layers. Subsequently, an adaptive Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) module fuses structural information from local to global scales. Finally, a cross-attention module is designed to explicitly model drug-drug interactions and identify key chemical substructures. Extensive experiments on five public benchmark datasets demonstrate that ResGIN-Att achieves competitive performance, comparing favorably against key baseline methods while exhibiting promising generalization capability and robustness.
Problem

Research questions and friction points this paper is trying to address.

Drug Synergy Prediction
Graph Neural Networks
Structural Bias
Generalization Capability
Model Interpretability
Innovation

Methods, ideas, or system contributions that make the work stand out.

Residual Graph Isomorphism Network
Attention Mechanism
Drug Synergy Prediction
Graph Neural Networks
Cross-Attention
J
Jiyan Song
College of Sciences, Shihezi University, 221 North 4th Road, Shihezi, 832003, Xinjiang, China
W
Wenyang Wang
College of Sciences, Shihezi University, 221 North 4th Road, Shihezi, 832003, Xinjiang, China
C
Chengcheng Yan
School of Mathematics and Computational Science, Xiangtan University, North 2nd Ring Road, Xiangtan, 411105, Hunan, China
Z
Zhiquan Han
College of Sciences, Shihezi University, 221 North 4th Road, Shihezi, 832003, Xinjiang, China
F
Feifei Zhao
College of Sciences, Shihezi University, 221 North 4th Road, Shihezi, 832003, Xinjiang, China