G–PLIP: Knowledge graph neural network for structure-free protein–ligand bioactivity prediction

Protein–ligand interactions (PLIs) determine the efficacy and safety profiles of small molecule drugs. Existing methods rely on either structural information or resource-intensive computations to predict PLI, casting doubt on whether it is possible to perform structure-free PLI predictions at low computational cost. Here we show that a light-weight graph neural network (GNN), trained with quantitative PLIs of a small number of proteins and ligands, is able to predict the strength of unseen PLIs. The model has no direct access to structural information about the protein–ligand complexes. Instead, the predictive power is provided by encoding the entire chemical and proteomic space in a single heterogeneous graph, encapsulating primary protein sequence, gene expression, the protein–protein interaction network, and structural similarities between ligands. This novel approach performs competitively with, or better than, structure-aware models. Our results suggest that existing PLI prediction methods may be improved by incorporating representation learning techniques that embed biological and chemical knowledge.