Sequence-based drug-target affinity prediction using weighted graph neural networks

Background Affinity prediction between molecule and protein is an important step of virtual screening, which is usually called drug-target affinity (DTA) prediction. Its accuracy directly influences the progress of drug development. Sequence-based drug-target affinity prediction can predict the affinity according to protein sequence, which is fast and can be applied to large datasets. However, due to the lack of protein structure information, the accuracy needs to be improved. Results The proposed model which is called WGNN-DTA can be competent in drug-target affinity (DTA) and compound-protein interaction (CPI) prediction tasks. Various experiments are designed to verify the performance of the proposed method in different scenarios, which proves that WGNN-DTA has the advantages of simplicity and high accuracy. Moreover, because it does not need complex steps such as multiple sequence alignment (MSA), it has fast execution speed, and can be suitable for the screening of large databases. Conclusion We construct protein and molecular graphs through sequence and SMILES that can effectively reflect their structures. To utilize the detail contact information of protein, graph neural network is used to extract features and predict the binding affinity based on the graphs, which is called weighted graph neural networks drug-target affinity predictor (WGNN-DTA). The proposed method has the advantages of simplicity and high accuracy.