Publications

Prediction of Drug Efficacy from Transcriptional Profiles with Deep Learning Nature biotechnology 2021 (IF=36.6)

Drug discovery focused on target proteins has been a successful strategy, but many diseases and biological processes lack obvious targets to enable such approaches. Here, to overcome this challenge, we describe a deep learning–based efficacy pre- diction system (DLEPS) that identifies drug candidates using a change in the gene expression profile in the diseased state as input. DLEPS was trained using chemical-induced changes in transcriptional profiles from the L1000 project. We found that the changes in transcriptional profiles for previously unexamined molecules were predicted with a Pearson correlation coefficient of 0.74. We examined three disorders and experimentally tested the top drug candidates in mouse disease models. Validation showed that perillen, chikusetsusaponin IV and trametinib confer disease-relevant impacts against obesity, hyperuricemia and nonalcoholic steatohepatitis, respectively. DLEPS can generate insights into pathogenic mechanisms, and we demonstrate that the MEK–ERK signaling pathway is a target for developing agents against nonalcoholic steatohepatitis. Our findings suggest that DLEPS is an effective tool for drug repurposing and discovery.

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