Identification of associations between lncRNA and drug resistance based on deep learning and attention mechanism

Introduction: Abnormal lncRNA expression can lead to the resistance of tumor cells to anticancer drugs, which is a crucial factor leading to high cancer mortality. Studying the relationship between lncRNA and drug resistance becomes necessary. Recently, deep learning has achieved promising results in predicting biomolecular associations. However, to our knowledge, deep learning-based lncRNA-drug resistance associations prediction has yet to be studied. Methods: Here, we proposed a new computational model, DeepLDA, which used deep neural networks and graph attention mechanisms to learn lncRNA and drug embeddings for predicting potential relationships between lncRNAs and drug resistance. DeepLDA first constructed similarity networks for lncRNAs and drugs using known association information. Subsequently, deep graph neural networks were utilized to automatically extract features from multiple attributes of lncRNAs and drugs. These features were fed into graph attention networks to learn lncRNA and drug embeddings. Finally, the embeddings were used to predict potential associations between lncRNAs and drug resistance. Results: Experimental results on the given datasets show that DeepLDA outperforms other machine learning-related prediction methods, and the deep neural network and attention mechanism can improve model performance. Dicsussion: In summary, this study proposes a powerful deep-learning model that can effectively predict lncRNA-drug resistance associations and facilitate the development of lncRNA-targeted drugs. DeepLDA is available at https://github.com/meihonggao/DeepLDA.