Despite decades of intensive search for compounds that modulate the activity of particular protein targets, a large proportion of the human kinome remains as yet undrugged. Effective approaches are therefore required to map the massive space of unexplored compound–kinase interactions for novel and potent activities. Here, we carry out a crowdsourced benchmarking of predictive algorithms for kinase inhibitor potencies across multiple kinase families tested on unpublished bioactivity data. We find the top-performing predictions are based on various models, including kernel learning, gradient boosting and deep learning, and their ensemble leads to a predictive accuracy exceeding that of single-dose kinase activity assays. We design experiments based on the model predictions and identify unexpected activities even for under-studied kinases, thereby accelerating experimental mapping efforts. The open-source prediction algorithms together with the bioactivities between 95 compounds and 295 kinases provide a resource for benchmarking prediction algorithms and for extending the druggable kinome.
Computational drug sensitivity models have the potential to improve therapeutic outcomes by identifying targeted drug components that are likely to achieve the highest efficacy for a cancer cell line at hand at a therapeutic dose. State of the art drug sensitivity models use regression techniques to predict the inhibitory concentration of a drug for a tumor cell line. This regression objective is not directly aligned with either of these principal goals of drug sensitivity models: We argue that drug sensitivity modeling should be seen as a ranking problem with an optimization criterion that quantifies a drug’s inhibitory capacity for the cancer cell line at hand relative to its toxicity for healthy cells. We derive an extension to the well-established drug sensitivity regression model PaccMann that employs a ranking loss and focuses on the ratio of inhibitory concentration and therapeutic dosage range. We find that the ranking extension significantly enhances the model’s capability to identify the most effective anticancer drugs for unseen tumor cell profiles based in on in-vitro data.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.