BACKGROUND: Predicting immune checkpoint inhibitor (ICI) response remains a significant challenge in cancer immunotherapy. Many existing approaches rely on differential gene expression analysis or predefined immune signatures, which may fail to capture the complex regulatory mechanisms underlying immune response. Network-based models attempt to integrate biological interactions, but they often lack a quantitative framework to assess how individual genes contribute within pathways, limiting the specificity and interpretability of biomarkers. Given these limitations, we developed PathNetDRP, a framework that integrates biological pathways, protein-protein interaction networks, and machine learning to identify functionally relevant biomarkers for ICI response prediction. RESULTS: We introduce PathNetDRP, a novel biomarker discovery approach that applies the PageRank algorithm to prioritize ICI-associated genes, maps them to relevant biological pathways, and calculates PathNetGene scores to quantify their contribution to immune response. Unlike conventional methods that focus solely on gene expression differences, PathNetDRP systematically incorporates biological context to improve biomarker selection. Validation across multiple independent cancer cohorts showed that PathNetDRP achieved strong predictive performance, with cross-validation the area under the receiver operating characteristic curves increasing from 0.780 to 0.940. Interestingly, PathNetDRP did not merely improve predictive accuracy; it also provided insights into key immune-related pathways, reinforcing its potential for identifying clinically relevant biomarkers. CONCLUSION: The biomarkers identified by PathNetDRP demonstrated robust predictive performance across cross-validation and independent validation datasets, suggesting their potential utility in clinical applications. Furthermore, enrichment analysis highlighted key immune-related pathways, providing a deeper understanding of their role in ICI response regulation. While these findings underscore the promise of PathNetDRP, future work will explore the integration of additional predictive features, such as tumor mutational burden and microsatellite instability, to further refine its applicability.

BACKGROUND: Accurate prediction of protein-ligand binding affinity is important for lowering the overall cost of drug discovery in structure-based drug design. For accurate predictions, many classical scoring functions and machine learning-based methods have been developed. However, these techniques tend to have limitations, mainly resulting from a lack of sufficient energy terms to describe the complex interactions between proteins and ligands. Recent deep-learning techniques can potentially solve this problem. However, the search for more efficient and appropriate deep-learning architectures and methods to represent protein-ligand complex is ongoing. RESULTS: In this study, we proposed a deep-neural network model to improve the prediction accuracy of protein-ligand complex binding affinity. The proposed model has two important features, descriptor embeddings with information on the local structures of a protein-ligand complex and an attention mechanism to highlight important descriptors for binding affinity prediction. The proposed model performed better than existing binding affinity prediction models on most benchmark datasets. CONCLUSIONS: We confirmed that an attention mechanism can capture the binding sites in a protein-ligand complex to improve prediction performance. Our code is available at https://github.com/Blue1993/BAPA .

BACKGROUND: Predicting the effect of drug-drug interactions (DDIs) precisely is important for safer and more effective drug co-prescription. Many computational approaches to predict the effect of DDIs have been proposed, with the aim of reducing the effort of identifying these interactions in vivo or in vitro, but room remains for improvement in prediction performance. RESULTS: In this study, we propose a novel deep learning model to predict the effect of DDIs more accurately.. The proposed model uses autoencoders and a deep feed-forward network that are trained using the structural similarity profiles (SSP), Gene Ontology (GO) term similarity profiles (GSP), and target gene similarity profiles (TSP) of known drug pairs to predict the pharmacological effects of DDIs. The results show that GSP and TSP increase the prediction accuracy when using SSP alone, and the autoencoder is more effective than PCA for reducing the dimensions of each profile. Our model showed better performance than the existing methods, and identified a number of novel DDIs that are supported by medical databases or existing research. CONCLUSIONS: We present a novel deep learning model for more accurate prediction of DDIs and their effects, which may assist in future research to discover novel DDIs and their pharmacological effects.

MOTIVATION: Identification of genes that can be used to predict prognosis in patients with cancer is important in that it can lead to improved therapy, and can also promote our understanding of tumor progression on the molecular level. One of the common but fundamental problems that render identification of prognostic genes and prediction of cancer outcomes difficult is the heterogeneity of patient samples. RESULTS: To reduce the effect of sample heterogeneity, we clustered data samples using K-means algorithm and applied modified PageRank to functional interaction (FI) networks weighted using gene expression values of samples in each cluster. Hub genes among resulting prioritized genes were selected as biomarkers to predict the prognosis of samples. This process outperformed traditional feature selection methods as well as several network-based prognostic gene selection methods when applied to Random Forest. We were able to find many cluster-specific prognostic genes for each dataset. Functional study showed that distinct biological processes were enriched in each cluster, which seems to reflect different aspect of tumor progression or oncogenesis among distinct patient groups. Taken together, these results provide support for the hypothesis that our approach can effectively identify heterogeneous prognostic genes, and these are complementary to each other, improving prediction accuracy. AVAILABILITY AND IMPLEMENTATION: https://github.com/mathcom/CPR. CONTACT: [email protected]. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.

BACKGROUND: The dominant paradigm in understanding drug action focuses on the intended therapeutic effects and frequent adverse reactions. However, this approach may limit opportunities to grasp unintended drug actions, which can open up channels to repurpose existing drugs and identify rare adverse drug reactions. Advances in systems biology can be exploited to comprehensively understand pharmacodynamic actions, although proper frameworks to represent drug actions are still lacking. RESULTS: We suggest a novel platform to construct a drug-specific pathway in which a molecular-level mechanism of action is formulated based on pharmacologic, pharmacogenomic, transcriptomic, and phenotypic data related to drug response ( http://databio.gachon.ac.kr/tools/ ). In this platform, an adoption of three conceptual levels imitating drug perturbation allows these pathways to be realistically rendered in comparison to those of other models. Furthermore, we propose a new method that exploits functional features of the drug-specific pathways to predict new indications as well as adverse reactions. For therapeutic uses, our predictions significantly overlapped with clinical trials and an up-to-date drug-disease association database. Also, our method outperforms existing methods with regard to classification of active compounds for cancers. For adverse reactions, our predictions were significantly enriched in an independent database derived from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) Adverse Event Reporting System and meaningfully cover an Adverse Reaction Database provided by Health Canada. Lastly, we discuss several predictions for both therapeutic indications and side-effects through the published literature. CONCLUSIONS: Our study addresses how we can computationally represent drug-signaling pathways to understand unintended drug actions and to facilitate drug discovery and screening.

MOTIVATION: Accurate identification of genetic variants such as single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) or RNA editing sites from RNA-Seq reads is important, yet challenging, because it necessitates a very low false-positive rate in read mapping. Although many read aligners are available, no single aligner was specifically developed or tested as an effective tool for SNP and RNA editing prediction. RESULTS: We present RASER, an accurate read aligner with novel mapping schemes and index tree structure that aims to reduce false-positive mappings due to existence of highly similar regions. We demonstrate that RASER shows the best mapping accuracy compared with other popular algorithms and highest sensitivity in identifying multiply mapped reads. As a result, RASER displays superb efficacy in unbiased mapping of the alternative alleles of SNPs and in identification of RNA editing sites. AVAILABILITY AND IMPLEMENTATION: RASER is written in C++ and freely available for download at https://github.com/jaegyoonahn/RASER.

Gene clustering is a method for finding gene sets which are related to the same biological processes or molecular function. In order to find these gene sets, previous studies have clustered genes which showed similar mRNA expression or a specific expression pattern in a (sub) sample set. However, for two contrasting groups of samples, it is not easy to identify gene sets which show significant expression pattern in only one group using current gene clustering methods. Existing biclustering methods use only one group (disease) of samples. It is hard to identify disease specific biclusters which are differentially expressed in the disease although those methods can find biclusters which have specific expression pattern. Here, we proposed a novel method using a genetic algorithm in gene expression data, in order to find gene sets which can represent specific subtype of cancer. Proposed method finds gene sets which have statistically differential mRNA expression on two contrasting samples and fraction of cancer samples. The resulting gene modules share higher number of GO (Gene Ontology) terms related to a specific disease than gene modules identified by current algorithms. We also identify that when we integrate protein-protein interaction data with gene expression data of colorectal cancer samples, proposed method can find more functionally related gene sets.

MOTIVATION: Identifying functional relation of copy number variation regions (CNVRs) and gene is an essential process in understanding the impact of genotypic variations on phenotype. There have been many related works, but only a few attempts were made to normal populations. RESULTS: To analyze the functions of genome-wide CNVRs, we applied a novel correlation measure called Correlation based on Sample Set (CSS) to paired Whole Genome TilePath array and messenger RNA (mRNA) microarray data from 210 HapMap individuals with normal phenotypes and calculated the confident CNVR-gene relationships. Two CNVR nodes form an edge if they regulate a common set of genes, allowing the construction of a global CNVR network. We performed functional enrichment on the common genes that were trans-regulated from CNVRs clustered together in our CNVR network. As a result, we observed that most of CNVR clusters in our CNVR network were reported to be involved in some biological processes or cellular functions, while most CNVR clusters from randomly constructed CNVR networks showed no evidence of functional enrichment. Those results imply that CSS is capable of finding related CNVR-gene pairs and CNVR networks that have functional significance. AVAILABILITY: http://embio.yonsei.ac.kr/~ Park/cnv_net.php. CONTACT: [email protected] SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.

MOTIVATION: Diagnosis and prognosis of cancer and understanding oncogenesis within the context of biological pathways is one of the most important research areas in bioinformatics. Recently, there have been several attempts to integrate interactome and transcriptome data to identify subnetworks that provide limited interpretations of known and candidate cancer genes, as well as increase classification accuracy. However, these studies provide little information about the detailed roles of identified cancer genes. RESULTS: To provide more information to the network, we constructed the network by incorporating genetic interactions and manually curated gene regulations to the protein interaction network. To make our newly constructed network cancer specific, we identified edges where two genes show different expression patterns between cancer and normal phenotypes. We showed that the integration of various datasets increased classification accuracy, which suggests that our network is more complete than a network based solely on protein interactions. We also showed that our network contains significantly more known cancer-related genes than other feature selection algorithms. Through observations of some examples of cancer-specific subnetworks, we were able to predict more detailed and interpretable roles of oncogenes and other cancer candidate genes in the prostate cancer cells. AVAILABILITY: http://embio.yonsei.ac.kr/~Ahn/tc.php. CONTACT: [email protected]

Copy-Number Variations (CNVs) can be defined as gains or losses that are greater than 1kbs of genomic DNA among phenotypically normal individuals. CNVs detected by microarray based approach are limited to medium or large sized ones because of its low resolution. Here we propose a novel approach to detect CNVs by aligning the short reads obtained by high-throughput sequencer to the previously assembled human genome sequence, and analyzing the distribution of the aligned reads. Application of our algorithm demonstrates the feasibility of detecting CNVs of arbitrary length, which include short ones that microarray based algorithms cannot detect. Also, false positive and false negative rates of the results were relatively low compared to those of microarray based algorithms.