Synergizing Anti-Cancer Drug Combinations With Dual-View Hypergraph Representation Fusion

Drug combination therapy plays a vital role in disease treatment, including cancer, as it contributes to treatment efficacy and can alleviate the effect of drug resistance. Although clinical trials and screening may provide valuable information about synergistic drug combinations, they suffer from challenging combinatorial space. Multiple methods are proposed to address those issues. However, they still fail in making full use of global and local triplet context relationships of known synergistic combinations. To this end, a deep learning model which leverages dual view hypergraph representation fusion for synergistic drug combinations identification is proposed, namely DVHSyn. It first extracts the transcriptome features of cancer cell lines and molecular structures of drugs. Subsequently, by modeling the synergistic effect on a hypergraph, DVHSyn simultaneously learns the local and global context of the sample triplets via a hypergraph view and its expanded heterogeneous graph view. Finally, the learned representations of the above two branches are fused selectively to predict synergistic drug combinations. Experiment results demonstrate that DVHSyn surpasses six other competing methods. One case study also reflects that DVHSyn has the potential to predict novel synergistic drug combinations. Overall, our method is effective in identifying synergistic drug combinations and provides new insights for novel drug development.