MDNNSyn: A Multi-Modal Deep Learning Framework for Drug Synergy Prediction

Synergistic drug combination prediction tasks based on the computational models have been widely studied and applied in the cancer field. However, most of models only consider the interactions between drug pairs and specific cell lines, without taking into account the multiple biological relationships of drug-drug and cell line-cell line that also largely affect synergistic mechanisms. To this end, here we propose a multi-modal deep learning framework, termed MDNNSyn, which adequately applies multi-source information and trains multi-modal features to infer potential synergistic drug combinations. MDNNSyn extracts topology modality features by implementing the multi-layer hypergraph neural network on drug synergy hypergraph and constructs semantic modality features through similarity strategy. A multi-modal fusion network layer with gated neural network is then employed for synergy score prediction. MDNNSyn is compared to five classic and state-of-the-art prediction methods on DrugCombDB and Oncology-Screen datasets. The model achieves area under the curve (AUC) scores of 0.8682 and 0.9013 on two datasets, an improvement of 3.70 % and 2.71 % over the second-best model. Case study indicates that MDNNSyn is capable of detecting potential synergistic drug combinations.