AttDRP: Attention Mechanism-based Model for Anti-Cancer Drug Response Prediction

Jonghwan Choi, Sangmin Seo, Sanghyun Park

http://doi.org/10.5626/JOK.2021.48.6.713

Resistance to anti-cancer drugs makes chemotherapy ineffective for cancer patients. Drug resistance is caused by genetic alterations in cancer cells. Many studies have investigated drug responses of diverse cancer cell lines to various anti-cancer drugs to understand drug response mechanisms. Existing studies have proposed machine learning models for drug response prediction to find effective anti-cancer drugs. However, currently there are no models to learn the relationship between anticancer drugs and genes to improve the prediction accuracy. In this paper, we proposed a predictive model AttDRP that could identify important genes associated with anti-cancer drugs and predict drug responses based on identified genes. AttDRP exhibited better predictive accuracy than existing models and we found that the attention scores of AttDRP could be effective tools to analyze molecular structures of anticancer drugs. We hope that our proposed method would contribute to the development of precision medicine for effective chemotherapy. Resistance to anti-cancer drugs makes chemotherapy ineffective for cancer patients. Drug resistance is caused by genetic alterations in cancer cells. Many studies have investigated drug responses of diverse cancer cell lines to various anti-cancer drugs to understand drug response mechanisms. Existing studies have proposed machine learning models for drug response prediction to find effective anti-cancer drugs. However, currently there are no models to learn the relationship between anticancer drugs and genes to improve the prediction accuracy. In this paper, we proposed a predictive model AttDRP that could identify important genes associated with anti-cancer drugs and predict drug responses based on identified genes. AttDRP exhibited better predictive accuracy than existing models and we found that the attention scores of AttDRP could be effective tools to analyze molecular structures of anticancer drugs.