TransferBAN-Syn: a transfer learning-based algorithm for predicting synergistic drug combinations against echinococcosis.

Echinococcosis is a zoonotic parasitic disease caused by the larvae of echinococcus tapeworms infesting the human body. Drug combination therapy is highly valued for the treatment of echinococcosis because of its potential to overcome resistance and enhance the response to existing drugs. Traditional methods of identifying drug combinations via biological experimentation is costly and time-consuming. Besides, the scarcity of existing drug combinations for echinococcosis hinders the development of computational methods. In this study, we propose a transfer learning-based model, namely TransferBAN-Syn, to identify synergistic drug combinations against echinococcosis based on abundant information of drug combinations against parasitic diseases. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work that leverages transfer learning to improve prediction accuracy with limited drug combination data in echinococcosis treatment. Specifically, TransferBAN-Syn contains a drug interaction feature representation module, a disease feature representation module, and a prediction module, where the bilinear attention network is employed in the drug interaction feature representation module to deeply extract the fusion feature of drug combinations. Besides, we construct a special dataset with multi-source information and drug combinations for parasitic diseases, including 21 parasitic diseases and echinococcosis. TransferBAN-Syn is designed and initially trained on the abundant data from the 21 parasitic diseases, which serves as the source domain. The parameters in the feature representation modules of drug interactions and diseases are preserved from this source domain, and those in the prediction module are then fine-tuned to specifically identify the synergistic drug combinations for echinococcosis in the target domain. Comparison experiments have shown that TransferBAN-Syn not only improves the accuracy of predicting echinococcosis drug combinations but also enhances generalizability. Furthermore, TransferBAN-Syn identifies potential drug combinations that hold promise in the treatment of echinococcosis. TransferBAN-Syn not only offers new synergistic drug combinations for echinococcosis but also provides a novel approach for predicting potential drug pairs for diseases with limited combination data.