KG-DTI: a knowledge graph based deep learning method for drug-target interaction predictions and Alzheimer’s disease drug repositions

Drug repositioning, which recommends approved drugs to potential targets by predicting drug-target interactions (DTIs), can save the cost and shorten the period of drug development. In this work, we propose a novel knowledge graph based deep learning method, named KG-DTI, for DTIs predictions. Specifically, a knowledge graph of 29,607 positive drug-target pairs is constructed by DistMult embedding strategy. A Conv-Conv module is proposed to extract features of drug-target pairs (DTPs), which is followed by a fully connected neural network for DTIs calculation. Data experiments are conducted on randomly chosen 11,840 positive and negative samples. It is obtained that KG-DTI achieves average ACC by 88.0%, F1-Score by 87.7%, AUROC by 94.3% and AUPR by 95% in five-fold cross-validation. In practice, KG-DTI is applied to reposition drugs to Alzheimer’s disease (AD) by Apolipoprotein E target. As results, it is found that seven of the top ten recommended drugs have been used in clinic practice or with literature supported useful to AD. Ligand-target docking results show that the top one recommended drug can dock with Apolipoprotein E significantly, which gives vital hints in repositioning potential drug to AD treatment.