1. Academic Validation
  2. RECOVER identifies synergistic drug combinations in vitro through sequential model optimization

RECOVER identifies synergistic drug combinations in vitro through sequential model optimization

  • Cell Rep Methods. 2023 Oct 23;3(10):100599. doi: 10.1016/j.crmeth.2023.100599.
Paul Bertin 1 Jarrid Rector-Brooks 1 Deepak Sharma 1 Thomas Gaudelet 2 Andrew Anighoro 2 Torsten Gross 2 Francisco Martínez-Peña 3 Eileen L Tang 3 M S Suraj 2 Cristian Regep 2 Jeremy B R Hayter 2 Maksym Korablyov 1 Nicholas Valiante 4 Almer van der Sloot 5 Mike Tyers 6 Charles E S Roberts 2 Michael M Bronstein 7 Luke L Lairson 3 Jake P Taylor-King 8 Yoshua Bengio 1
Affiliations

Affiliations

  • 1 Mila, the Quebec AI Institute, Montreal, QC, Canada.
  • 2 Relation Therapeutics, London, UK.
  • 3 Department of Chemistry, The Scripps Research Institute, La Jolla, CA, USA.
  • 4 Innovac Therapeutics, Inc., Cambridge, MA, USA.
  • 5 IRIC, Institute for Research in Immunology and Cancer, Université de Montréal, Montreal, QC, Canada.
  • 6 Program in Molecular Medicine, Peter Gilgan Centre for Research and Learning, The Hospital for Sick Children, 686 Bay Street, Toronto, ON M5G 0A4, Canada.
  • 7 Relation Therapeutics, London, UK; Department of Computer Science, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK.
  • 8 Relation Therapeutics, London, UK. Electronic address: jake@relationrx.com.
Abstract

For large libraries of small molecules, exhaustive combinatorial chemical screens become infeasible to perform when considering a range of disease models, assay conditions, and dose ranges. Deep learning models have achieved state-of-the-art results in silico for the prediction of synergy scores. However, databases of drug combinations are biased toward synergistic agents and results do not generalize out of distribution. During 5 rounds of experimentation, we employ sequential model optimization with a deep learning model to select drug combinations increasingly enriched for synergism and active against a Cancer cell line-evaluating only ∼5% of the total search space. Moreover, we find that learned drug embeddings (using structural information) begin to reflect biological mechanisms. In silico benchmarking suggests search queries are ∼5-10× enriched for highly synergistic drug combinations by using sequential rounds of evaluation when compared with random selection or ∼3× when using a pretrained model.

Keywords

CP: Systems biology; active learning; deep learning; drug combination; drug synergy; in vitro screening; machine learning; oncology; sequential model optimization.

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