PUBLICATIONS
2025
3.
Sunwoo Jung; Sunyong Yoo
Abstract | Links | BibTeX | Dimensions | Tags: ADR, Artificial Intelligence, Attention mechanism, Bioinformatics, DDI, Deep learning, Text mining
@article{Jung2024,
title = {Interpretable prediction of drug-drug interactions via text embedding in biomedical literature},
author = {Sunwoo Jung and Sunyong Yoo},
url = {https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0010482524015816},
doi = {10.1016/j.compbiomed.2024.109496},
isbn = {0010-4825},
year = {2025},
date = {2025-02-01},
urldate = {2025-02-01},
journal = {Computers in Biology and Medicine},
volume = {185},
pages = {109496},
abstract = {Polypharmacy is a promising approach for treating diseases, especially those with complex symptoms. However, it can lead to unexpected drug-drug interactions (DDIs), potentially reducing efficacy and triggering adverse drug reactions (ADRs). Predicting the risk of DDIs is crucial for ensuring safe drug use, particularly by identifying the types of DDIs and the mechanisms involved. Therefore, this study used biomedical literature to proposed hierarchical attention-based deep learning models to predict DDIs and their types. The proposed model consists of two components: drug embedding and DDI prediction. The drug embedding module extracts representation vectors that effectively capture drug properties using sentence and sequence embedding methods. For sentence embedding, a pre-trained biomedical language model is used to map drug-related sentences into vector space. For sequence embedding, sentence embedding vectors are sequentially fed into bidirectional long short-term memory with a hierarchical attention network, enabling the analysis of sentences relevant to DDI prediction while accounting for the order of the sentences. Finally, DDI prediction is performed using a deep neural network based on the sequence embedding vectors of a drug pair. Our model achieved high performances in the accuracy (0.85–0.90), AUROC (0.98–0.99), and AUPR (0.63–0.95) performance across 164 DDI types. Additionally, the proposed model showed improvements in up to 11 % in AUROC, and 8 % in AUPR. Furthermore, model interprets predictions by leveraging attention mechanisms and drug similarity. The results indicated that the model considered various factors beyond similarity to predict DDIs. These findings may help prevent unforeseen medical accidents and reduce healthcare costs by predicting detailed drug interaction types.},
note = {Correspondence to Sunyong Yoo},
keywords = {ADR, Artificial Intelligence, Attention mechanism, Bioinformatics, DDI, Deep learning, Text mining},
pubstate = {published},
tppubtype = {article}
}
Polypharmacy is a promising approach for treating diseases, especially those with complex symptoms. However, it can lead to unexpected drug-drug interactions (DDIs), potentially reducing efficacy and triggering adverse drug reactions (ADRs). Predicting the risk of DDIs is crucial for ensuring safe drug use, particularly by identifying the types of DDIs and the mechanisms involved. Therefore, this study used biomedical literature to proposed hierarchical attention-based deep learning models to predict DDIs and their types. The proposed model consists of two components: drug embedding and DDI prediction. The drug embedding module extracts representation vectors that effectively capture drug properties using sentence and sequence embedding methods. For sentence embedding, a pre-trained biomedical language model is used to map drug-related sentences into vector space. For sequence embedding, sentence embedding vectors are sequentially fed into bidirectional long short-term memory with a hierarchical attention network, enabling the analysis of sentences relevant to DDI prediction while accounting for the order of the sentences. Finally, DDI prediction is performed using a deep neural network based on the sequence embedding vectors of a drug pair. Our model achieved high performances in the accuracy (0.85–0.90), AUROC (0.98–0.99), and AUPR (0.63–0.95) performance across 164 DDI types. Additionally, the proposed model showed improvements in up to 11 % in AUROC, and 8 % in AUPR. Furthermore, model interprets predictions by leveraging attention mechanisms and drug similarity. The results indicated that the model considered various factors beyond similarity to predict DDIs. These findings may help prevent unforeseen medical accidents and reduce healthcare costs by predicting detailed drug interaction types.
2.
Dohyeon Lee; Sunyong Yoo
Abstract | Links | BibTeX | Dimensions | Tags: Artificial Intelligence, Attention mechanism, Bioinformatics, Cardiotoxicity, Deep learning, Graph attention network
@article{Lee2025,
title = {hERGAT: predicting hERG blockers using graph attention mechanism through atom- and molecule-level interaction analyses},
author = {Dohyeon Lee and Sunyong Yoo},
url = {https://link.springer.com/article/10.1186/s13321-025-00957-x?utm_source=rct_congratemailt&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=oa_20250128&utm_content=10.1186/s13321-025-00957-x},
doi = {10.1186/s13321-025-00957-x},
issn = {1758-2946},
year = {2025},
date = {2025-01-28},
urldate = {2025-01-28},
journal = {Journal of Cheminformatics},
volume = {17},
number = {11},
abstract = {The human ether-a-go-go-related gene (hERG) channel plays a critical role in the electrical activity of the heart, and its blockers can cause serious cardiotoxic effects. Thus, screening for hERG channel blockers is a crucial step in the drug development process. Many in silico models have been developed to predict hERG blockers, which can efficiently save time and resources. However, previous methods have found it hard to achieve high performance and to interpret the predictive results. To overcome these challenges, we have proposed hERGAT, a graph neural network model with an attention mechanism, to consider compound interactions on atomic and molecular levels. In the atom-level interaction analysis, we applied a graph attention mechanism (GAT) that integrates information from neighboring nodes and their extended connections. The hERGAT employs a gated recurrent unit (GRU) with the GAT to learn information between more distant atoms. To confirm this, we performed clustering analysis and visualized a correlation heatmap, verifying the interactions between distant atoms were considered during the training process. In the molecule-level interaction analysis, the attention mechanism enables the target node to focus on the most relevant information, highlighting the molecular substructures that play crucial roles in predicting hERG blockers. Through a literature review, we confirmed that highlighted substructures have a significant role in determining the chemical and biological characteristics related to hERG activity. Furthermore, we integrated physicochemical properties into our hERGAT model to improve the performance. Our model achieved an area under the receiver operating characteristic of 0.907 and an area under the precision-recall of 0.904, demonstrating its effectiveness in modeling hERG activity and offering a reliable framework for optimizing drug safety in early development stages.},
note = {Correspondence to Sunyong Yoo},
keywords = {Artificial Intelligence, Attention mechanism, Bioinformatics, Cardiotoxicity, Deep learning, Graph attention network},
pubstate = {published},
tppubtype = {article}
}
The human ether-a-go-go-related gene (hERG) channel plays a critical role in the electrical activity of the heart, and its blockers can cause serious cardiotoxic effects. Thus, screening for hERG channel blockers is a crucial step in the drug development process. Many in silico models have been developed to predict hERG blockers, which can efficiently save time and resources. However, previous methods have found it hard to achieve high performance and to interpret the predictive results. To overcome these challenges, we have proposed hERGAT, a graph neural network model with an attention mechanism, to consider compound interactions on atomic and molecular levels. In the atom-level interaction analysis, we applied a graph attention mechanism (GAT) that integrates information from neighboring nodes and their extended connections. The hERGAT employs a gated recurrent unit (GRU) with the GAT to learn information between more distant atoms. To confirm this, we performed clustering analysis and visualized a correlation heatmap, verifying the interactions between distant atoms were considered during the training process. In the molecule-level interaction analysis, the attention mechanism enables the target node to focus on the most relevant information, highlighting the molecular substructures that play crucial roles in predicting hERG blockers. Through a literature review, we confirmed that highlighted substructures have a significant role in determining the chemical and biological characteristics related to hERG activity. Furthermore, we integrated physicochemical properties into our hERGAT model to improve the performance. Our model achieved an area under the receiver operating characteristic of 0.907 and an area under the precision-recall of 0.904, demonstrating its effectiveness in modeling hERG activity and offering a reliable framework for optimizing drug safety in early development stages.
2024
1.
Soyeon Lee; Sunyong Yoo
Abstract | Links | BibTeX | Dimensions | Tags: Artificial Intelligence, Attention mechanism, Bioinformatics, Deep learning, Drug-induced liver injury, Feature importance, Hepatotoxicity, in silico
@article{lee2024interdili,
title = {InterDILI: interpretable prediction of drug-induced liver injury through permutation feature importance and attention mechanism},
author = {Soyeon Lee and Sunyong Yoo},
url = {https://link.springer.com/article/10.1186/s13321-023-00796-8},
doi = {10.1186/s13321-023-00796-8},
year = {2024},
date = {2024-01-03},
urldate = {2024-01-03},
journal = {Journal of Cheminformatics},
volume = {16},
number = {1},
pages = {1},
publisher = {Springer},
abstract = {Safety is one of the important factors constraining the distribution of clinical drugs on the market. Drug-induced liver injury (DILI) is the leading cause of safety problems produced by drug side effects. Therefore, the DILI risk of approved drugs and potential drug candidates should be assessed. Currently, in vivo and in vitro methods are used to test DILI risk, but both methods are labor-intensive, time-consuming, and expensive. To overcome these problems, many in silico methods for DILI prediction have been suggested. Previous studies have shown that DILI prediction models can be utilized as prescreening tools, and they achieved a good performance. However, there are still limitations in interpreting the prediction results. Therefore, this study focused on interpreting the model prediction to analyze which features could potentially cause DILI. For this, five publicly available datasets were collected to train and test the model. Then, various machine learning methods were applied using substructure and physicochemical descriptors as inputs and the DILI label as the output. The interpretation of feature importance was analyzed by recognizing the following general-to-specific patterns: (i) identifying general important features of the overall DILI predictions, and (ii) highlighting specific molecular substructures which were highly related to the DILI prediction for each compound. The results indicated that the model not only captured the previously known properties to be related to DILI but also proposed a new DILI potential substructural of physicochemical properties. The models for the DILI prediction achieved an area under the receiver operating characteristic (AUROC) of 0.88–0.97 and an area under the Precision-Recall curve (AUPRC) of 0.81–0.95. From this, we hope the proposed models can help identify the potential DILI risk of drug candidates at an early stage and offer valuable insights for drug development.},
note = {Correspondence to Sunyong Yoo},
keywords = {Artificial Intelligence, Attention mechanism, Bioinformatics, Deep learning, Drug-induced liver injury, Feature importance, Hepatotoxicity, in silico},
pubstate = {published},
tppubtype = {article}
}
Safety is one of the important factors constraining the distribution of clinical drugs on the market. Drug-induced liver injury (DILI) is the leading cause of safety problems produced by drug side effects. Therefore, the DILI risk of approved drugs and potential drug candidates should be assessed. Currently, in vivo and in vitro methods are used to test DILI risk, but both methods are labor-intensive, time-consuming, and expensive. To overcome these problems, many in silico methods for DILI prediction have been suggested. Previous studies have shown that DILI prediction models can be utilized as prescreening tools, and they achieved a good performance. However, there are still limitations in interpreting the prediction results. Therefore, this study focused on interpreting the model prediction to analyze which features could potentially cause DILI. For this, five publicly available datasets were collected to train and test the model. Then, various machine learning methods were applied using substructure and physicochemical descriptors as inputs and the DILI label as the output. The interpretation of feature importance was analyzed by recognizing the following general-to-specific patterns: (i) identifying general important features of the overall DILI predictions, and (ii) highlighting specific molecular substructures which were highly related to the DILI prediction for each compound. The results indicated that the model not only captured the previously known properties to be related to DILI but also proposed a new DILI potential substructural of physicochemical properties. The models for the DILI prediction achieved an area under the receiver operating characteristic (AUROC) of 0.88–0.97 and an area under the Precision-Recall curve (AUPRC) of 0.81–0.95. From this, we hope the proposed models can help identify the potential DILI risk of drug candidates at an early stage and offer valuable insights for drug development.