Deep learning applied to drug discovery and repurposing
In a recently accepted manuscript titled "Deep learning applications for predicting pharmacological properties of drugs and drug repurposing using transcriptomic data", scientists from Insilico Medicine, Inc located at the Emerging Technology Centers at Johns Hopkins University in collaboration with Datalytic Solutions and Mind Research Network presented a novel approach applying deep neural networks (DNNs) to predict pharmacologic properties of many drugs. In this study, scientists trained deep neural networks to predict the therapeutic use of a large number of drugs using gene expression data obtained from high-throughput experiments on human cell lines. Authors used a sophisticated approach of measuring the differential signaling pathway activation score for a large number of pathways to reduce the dimensionality of the data while retaining biological relevance and used these scores to train the deep neural networks.