A novel drug-drug interactions prediction method based on a graph attention network

With the increasing need for public health and drug development, combination therapy has become widely used in clinical settings. However, the risk of unanticipated adverse effects and unknown toxicity caused by drug-drug interactions (DDIs) is a serious public health issue for polypharmacy safety. Traditional experimental methods for detecting DDIs are expensive and time-consuming. Therefore, many computational methods have been developed in recent years to predict DDIs with the growing availability of data and advancements in artificial intelligence. In silico methods have proven to be effective in predicting DDIs, but detecting potential interactions, especially for newly discovered drugs without an existing DDI network, remains a challenge. In this study, we propose a predicting method of DDIs named HAG-DDI based on graph attention networks. We consider the differences in mechanisms between DDIs and add learning of semantic-level attention, which can focus on advanced representations of DDIs. By treating interactions as nodes and the presence of the same drug as edges, and constructing small subnetworks during training, we effectively mitigate potential bias issues arising from limited data availability. Our experimental results show that our method achieves an F1-score of 0.952, proving that our model is a viable alternative for DDIs prediction. The codes are available at: https://github.com/xtnenu/DDIFramework.