Accurate drug response prediction is a critical bottleneck in computational biochemistry, limited by the challenge of modelling the interplay between molecular structure and cellular context. In cancer research, this is acute due to tumour heterogeneity and genomic variability, which hinder the identification of effective therapies. Conventional approaches often fail to capture non-linear relationships between chemical features and biological outcomes across diverse cell lines. To address this, we introduce DPD-Cancer, a deep learning method based on a Graph Attention Transformer (GAT) framework. It is designed for small molecule anti-cancer activity classification and the quantitative prediction of cell-line specific responses, specifically growth inhibition concentration (pGI50). Benchmarked against state-of-the-art methods (pdCSM-cancer, ACLPred, and MLASM), DPD-Cancer demonstrated superior performance, achieving an Area Under ROC Curve (AUC) of up to 0.87 on strictly partitioned NCI60 data and up to 0.98 on ACLPred/MLASM datasets. For pGI50 prediction across 10 cancer types and 73 cell lines, the model achieved Pearson's correlation coefficients of up to 0.72 on independent tes
Quantum-classical Hybrid Machine Learning (QHML) models are recognized for their robust performance and high generalization ability even for relatively small datasets. These qualities offer unique advantages for anti-cancer drug response prediction, where the number of available samples is typically small. However, such hybrid models appear to be very sensitive to the data encoding used at the interface of a neural network and a quantum circuit, with suboptimal choices leading to stability issues. To address this problem, we propose a novel strategy that uses a normalization function based on a moderated gradient version of the $\tanh$. This method transforms the outputs of the neural networks without concentrating them at the extreme value ranges. Our idea was evaluated on a dataset of gene expression and drug response measurements for various cancer cell lines, where we compared the prediction performance of a classical deep learning model and several QHML models. These results confirmed that QHML performed better than the classical models when data was optimally normalized. This study opens up new possibilities for biomedical data analysis using quantum computers.
While cancer has traditionally been considered a genetic disease, mounting evidence indicates an important role for non-genetic (epigenetic) mechanisms. Common anti-cancer drugs have recently been observed to induce the adoption of non-genetic drug-tolerant cell states, thereby accelerating the evolution of drug resistance. This confounds conventional high-dose treatment strategies aimed at maximal tumor reduction, since high doses can simultaneously promote non-genetic resistance. In this work, we study optimal dosing of anti-cancer treatment under drug-induced cell plasticity. We show that the optimal dosing strategy steers the tumor to a fixed equilibrium composition between sensitive and tolerant cells, while precisely balancing the trade-off between cell kill and tolerance induction. The optimal equilibrium strategy ranges from applying a low dose continuously to applying the maximum dose intermittently, depending on the dynamics of tolerance induction. We finally discuss how our approach can be integrated with in vitro data to derive patient-specific treatment insights.
Cold atmospheric plasma (CAP) is a promising new agent for (selective) cancer treatment, but the underlying cause of the anti-cancer effect of CAP is not well understood yet. Among different theories and observations, one theory in particular has been postulated in great detail and consists of a very complex network of reactions that are claimed to account for the anti-cancer effect of CAP. Here, the key concept is a reactivation of two specific apoptotic cell signaling pathways through catalase inactivation caused by CAP. Thus, it is postulated that the anti-cancer effect of CAP is due to its ability to inactivate catalase, either directly or indirectly. A theoretical investigation of the proposed theory, especially the role of catalase inactivation, can contribute to the understanding of the underlying cause of the anti-cancer effect of CAP. In the present study, we develop a mathematical model to analyze the proposed catalase-dependent anti-cancer effect of CAP. Our results show that a catalase-dependent reactivation of the two apoptotic pathways of interest is unlikely to contribute to the observed anti-cancer effect of CAP. Thus, we believe that other theories of the underlyin
Azurin and its derived peptides, notably p28, exhibit significant anticancer properties, primarily by stabilizing the tumor suppressor protein p53 and preventing its degradation. Previous studies have shown that p28 binds to p53's DNA-binding domain, protecting it from degradation mechanisms. Expanding on these findings, our research explored whether p28 acts on additional cancer pathways beyond p53 stabilization. Specifically, we examined the interactions between p28 and Human Double Minute 2 (HDM2), a protein that downregulates p53's tumor-suppressive activity by binding to its transactivation domain (TAD). HDM2 is crucial in diminishing p53's function, and our study aimed to determine if p28 disrupts this HDM2-p53 interaction. Using HADDOCK docking and molecular dynamics simulations, we identified three stable conformations of the HDM2-p28 complex. These conformations effectively block HDM2's hydrophobic pocket, allowing for sustained inter-chain interactions and showing favorable binding energies. Further analysis pinpointed essential residues in these interactions, and we calculated interaction energies using the Molecular Mechanics Poisson-Boltzmann Surface Area (MMPBSA) meth
In this letter, we present anti-cancer drug delivery strategies using knowledges obtained from our recent studies. We have conducted inverse analyses of "density distributions of colloidal particles near a focused surface" and "pair potentials between the surface and the colloidal particle" using data measured by optical tweezers (OT) and atomic force microscopy (AFM). Non-additive Asakura-Oosawa (NAO) theory and a lattice theory in statistical mechanics of simple polymers have been also our research topics. Summarizing the knowledges, we propose two strategies to increase the delivery rate of capsule shaped anti-cancer drugs to cancer cells. We consider that enhanced repulsion between the normal cell and the drug accelerates the attraction between the cancer cell and the drug, which can be named enhanced repulsion and accelerated adsorption (ERAA) effect. To realize the ERAA effect, we propose a supporting method for measuring the interactions using OT and AFM. In the second strategy, dose of water-soluble polymers is considered to realize adsorptions of the drugs and cancer cell derived exosomes onto the cancer cells, which we call non-specific and selective adsorption (NSSA) eff
Drug combination therapy is a powerful solution for the treatment of complex disease such as cancers due to its capability of therapeutic efficacy and reducing side effects. Nevertheless, it is very difficult to screen all drug combinations by experiments since the vast number of possible combinations. Currently, computational methods, especially graph neural networks and transformer, have been developed to discover the prioritization of drug combinations and shown promising potentials. Despite great achievements have been obtained by existing computational models, they all neglected high-order semantic information of drugs and the importance of the chemical bond features, which contained rich information and is represented by edge of graphs in drug predictions. In this work, we present a novel model named EGTSyn (Edge-based Graph Transformer network for drug Synergy prediction) for anti-cancer drug synergistic effect prediction. We design an EGNN (edge-based graph neural network) module and a GTDblock (Graph Transformer for Drugs block). EGNN is employed to capture the global structure information of the chemicals as well as the importance of chemical bonds that has been neglected
In this study, we investigated the potential of GPT-3 for the anti-cancer drug sensitivity prediction task using structured pharmacogenomics data across five tissue types and evaluated its performance with zero-shot prompting and fine-tuning paradigms. The drug's smile representation and cell line's genomic mutation features were predictive of the drug response. The results from this study have the potential to pave the way for designing more efficient treatment protocols in precision oncology.
Personalized cancer treatment requires a thorough understanding of complex interactions between drugs and cancer cell lines in varying genetic and molecular contexts. To address this, high-throughput screening has been used to generate large-scale drug response data, facilitating data-driven computational models. Such models can capture complex drug-cell line interactions across various contexts in a fully data-driven manner. However, accurately prioritizing the most sensitive drugs for each cell line still remains a significant challenge. To address this, we developed neural ranking approaches that leverage large-scale drug response data across multiple cell lines from diverse cancer types. Unlike existing approaches that primarily utilize regression and classification techniques for drug response prediction, we formulated the objective of drug selection and prioritization as a drug ranking problem. In this work, we proposed two neural listwise ranking methods that learn latent representations of drugs and cell lines, and then use those representations to score drugs in each cell line via a learnable scoring function. Specifically, we developed a neural listwise ranking method, Li
Understanding the nanoscale structural changes can provide the physical state of cells/tissues. It has been now shown that increases in nanoscale structural alterations are associated with the progress of carcinogenesis in most of the cancer cases, including early carcinogenesis. Anti-cancerous therapies are intended for the growth inhibition of cancer cells; however, it is challenging to detect the efficacy of such drugs in early stages of treatment. A unique method to assess the impact of anti-cancerous drugs on cancerous cells/tissues is to probe the nanoscale structural alterations. In this paper, we study the effect of different anti-cancerous drugs on ovarian tumorigenic cells, using their nanoscale structural alterations as a biomarker. Transmission electron microscopy (TEM) imaging on thin cell sections is performed to obtain their nanoscale structures. The degree of nanoscale structural alterations of tumorigenic cells and anti-cancerous drug treated tumorigenic cells are quantified by using the recently developed inverse participation ratio (IPR) technique. Results show an increase in the degree of nanoscale fluctuations in tumorigenic cells relative to non-tumorigenic ce
Due to cancer's complex nature and variable response to therapy, precision oncology informed by omics sequence analysis has become the current standard of care. However, the amount of data produced for each patients makes it difficult to quickly identify the best treatment regimen. Moreover, limited data availability has hindered computational methods' abilities to learn patterns associated with effective drug-cell line pairs. In this work, we propose the use of contrastive learning to improve learned drug and cell line representations by preserving relationship structures associated with drug mechanism of action and cell line cancer types. In addition to achieving enhanced performance relative to a state-of-the-art method, we find that classifiers using our learned representations exhibit a more balances reliance on drug- and cell line-derived features when making predictions. This facilitates more personalized drug prioritizations that are informed by signals related to drug resistance.
Cancer is a primary cause of human death, but discovering drugs and tailoring cancer therapies are expensive and time-consuming. We seek to facilitate the discovery of new drugs and treatment strategies for cancer using variational autoencoders (VAEs) and multi-layer perceptrons (MLPs) to predict anti-cancer drug responses. Our model takes as input gene expression data of cancer cell lines and anti-cancer drug molecular data and encodes these data with our {\sc {GeneVae}} model, which is an ordinary VAE model, and a rectified junction tree variational autoencoder ({\sc JTVae}) model, respectively. A multi-layer perceptron processes these encoded features to produce a final prediction. Our tests show our system attains a high average coefficient of determination ($R^{2} = 0.83$) in predicting drug responses for breast cancer cell lines and an average $R^{2} = 0.845$ for pan-cancer cell lines. Additionally, we show that our model can generates effective drug compounds not previously used for specific cancer cell lines.
Cancer development is driven by mutations and selective forces, including the action of the immune system and interspecific competition. When administered to patients, anti-cancer therapies affect the development and dynamics of tumours, possibly with various degrees of resistance due to immunoediting and microenvironment. Tumours are able to express a variety of competing phenotypes with different attributes and thus respond differently to various anti-cancer therapies. In this paper, a mathematical framework incorporating a system of delay differential equations for the immune system activation cycle and an agent-based approach for tumour-immune interaction is presented. The focus is on those metastatic, secondary solid lesions that are still undetected and non-vascularised. By using available experimental data, we analyse the effects of combination therapies on these lesions and investigate the role of mutations on the rates of success of common treatments. Findings show that mutations, growth properties and immunoediting influence therapies' outcomes in nonlinear and complex ways, affecting cancer lesion morphologies, phenotypical compositions and overall proliferation patterns
Transfer learning has been shown to be effective in many applications in which training data for the target problem are limited but data for a related (source) problem are abundant. In this paper, we apply transfer learning to the prediction of anti-cancer drug response. Previous transfer learning studies for drug response prediction focused on building models that predict the response of tumor cells to a specific drug treatment. We target the more challenging task of building general prediction models that can make predictions for both new tumor cells and new drugs. We apply the classic transfer learning framework that trains a prediction model on the source dataset and refines it on the target dataset, and extends the framework through ensemble. The ensemble transfer learning pipeline is implemented using LightGBM and two deep neural network (DNN) models with different architectures. Uniquely, we investigate its power for three application settings including drug repurposing, precision oncology, and new drug development, through different data partition schemes in cross-validation. We test the proposed ensemble transfer learning on benchmark in vitro drug screening datasets, taki
Anti-cancer drug sensitivity prediction using deep learning models for individual cell line is a significant challenge in personalized medicine. REFINED (REpresentation of Features as Images with NEighborhood Dependencies) CNN (Convolutional Neural Network) based models have shown promising results in drug sensitivity prediction. The primary idea behind REFINED CNN is representing high dimensional vectors as compact images with spatial correlations that can benefit from convolutional neural network architectures. However, the mapping from a vector to a compact 2D image is not unique due to variations in considered distance measures and neighborhoods. In this article, we consider predictions based on ensembles built from such mappings that can improve upon the best single REFINED CNN model prediction. Results illustrated using NCI60 and NCIALMANAC databases shows that the ensemble approaches can provide significant performance improvement as compared to individual models. We further illustrate that a single mapping created from the amalgamation of the different mappings can provide performance similar to stacking ensemble but with significantly lower computational complexity.
In here presented in silico study we suggest a way how to implement the evolutionary principles into anti-cancer therapy design. We hypothesize that instead of its ongoing supervised adaptation, the therapy may be constructed as a self-sustaining evolutionary process in a dynamic fitness landscape established implicitly by evolving cancer cells, microenvironment and the therapy itself. For these purposes, we replace a unified therapy with the `therapy species', which is a population of heterogeneous elementary therapies, and propose a way how to turn the toxicity of the elementary therapy into its fitness in a way conforming to evolutionary causation. As a result, not only the therapies govern the evolution of different cell phenotypes, but the cells' resistances govern the evolution of the therapies as well. We illustrate the approach by the minimalistic ad hoc evolutionary model. Its results indicate that the resistant cells could bias the evolution towards more toxic elementary therapies by inhibiting the less toxic ones. As the evolutionary causation of cancer drug resistance has been intensively studied for a few decades, we refer to cancer as a special case to illustrate pure
The tumor-immune system plays a critical role in colorectal cancer progression. Recent preclinical and clinical studies showed that combination therapy with anti-PD-L1 and cancer vaccines improved treatment response. In this study, we developed a multiscale mathematical model of interactions among tumors, immune cells, and cytokines to investigate tumor evolutionary dynamics under different therapeutic strategies. Additionally, we established a computational framework based on approximate Bayesian computation to generate virtual tumor samples and capture inter-individual heterogeneity in treatment response. The results demonstrated that a multiple low-dose regimen significantly reduced advanced tumor burden compared to baseline treatment in anti-PD-L1 therapy. In contrast, the maximum dose therapy yielded superior tumor growth control in cancer vaccine therapy. Furthermore, cytotoxic T cells were identified as a consistent predictive biomarker both before and after treatment initiation. Notably, the cytotoxic T cells-to-regulatory T cells ratio specifically served as a robust pre-treatment predictive biomarker, offering potential clinical utility for patient stratification and ther
This study explores how causal inference models, specifically the Linear Non-Gaussian Acyclic Model (LiNGAM), can extract causal relationships between demographic factors, treatments, conditions, and outcomes from observational patient data, enabling insights beyond correlation. Unlike traditional randomized controlled trials (RCTs), which establish causal relationships within narrowly defined populations, our method leverages broader observational data, improving generalizability. Using over 40 features in the Duke MRI Breast Cancer dataset, we found that Adjuvant Anti-Her2 Neu Therapy increased local recurrence-free survival by 169 days, while Skin/Nipple involvement reduced it by 351 days. These findings highlight the therapy's importance for Her2-positive patients and the need for targeted interventions for high-risk cases, informing personalized treatment strategies.
Cancer is recognized as a complex group of diseases, contributing to the highest global mortality rates, with increasing prevalence and a trend toward affecting younger populations. It is characterized by uncontrolled proliferation of abnormal cells, invasion of adjacent tissues, and metastasis to distant organs. Garcinia cowa, a traditional medicinal plant widely used in Southeast Asia, including Vietnam, is employed to treat fever, cough, indigestion, as a laxative, and for parasitic diseases. Numerous xanthone compounds isolated from this species exhibit a broad spectrum of biological activities, with some showing promise as anti cancer and antimalarial agents. Network pharmacology analysis successfully identified key bioactive compounds Rubraxanthone, Garcinone D, Norcowanin, Cowanol, and Cowaxanthone alongside their primary protein targets (TNF, CTNNB1, SRC, NFKB1, and MTOR), providing critical insights into the molecular mechanisms underlying their anti-cancer effects. The Graph Attention Network algorithm demonstrated superior predictive performance, achieving an R2 of 0.98 and an RMSE of 0.02 after data augmentation, highlighting its accuracy in predicting pIC50 values for
Colorectal cancer (CRC) remains a leading cause of cancer-related mortality worldwide, highlighting the urgent need for advanced therapeutic strategies. Nanoparticle-based drug delivery systems have emerged as a promising approach to improve the specificity and efficacy of anticancer treatments. This review examines three cutting-edge mesoporous silica nanoparticle (MSN)-based drug delivery to introduce novel CRC therapy, each utilizing unique functionalization strategies for targeted drug release. The first system, hyaluronidase-responsive MSN-HA/DOX, employs biotin-modified hyaluronic acid to facilitate dual-stimulus drug release in the tumor microenvironment, exhibiting enhanced in vivo tumor inhibition. The DOX/SLN-PEG-Biotin utilizes polyethylene glycol and biotin to improve drug stability and target biotin-overexpressing CRC cells, demonstrating superior anti-cancer efficacy in vitro and in vivo. Lastly, galactosylated chitosan-functionalized MSNs enable targeted delivery through asialoglycoprotein receptors, providing controlled drug release and strong therapeutic potential. Collectively, these systems highlight the advancements in nanoparticle functionalization for CRC trea