A Deep Learning based Efficacy Prediction System for Drug Discovery [Perillen]

Target protein-based drug and research compound discovery has been undeniably successful strategy in life science research, yet many diseases and biological processes lack obvious targets to enable these approaches. Here, to overcome this major challenge we have developed a deep-learning based efficacy prediction system (DLEPS) to identify potent agents to treat diverse diseases; DLEPS was trained using L1000 project chemical induced “changes of transcriptional profiles” (CTP) data as input. Strikingly, we found that the CTPs for previously unexamined molecules were precisely predicted (0.74 Pearson correlation coefficient). We used DLEPS to examine 4 disorders, and experimentally validated that perillen, chikusetsusaponin IV, trametinib, and liquiritin confer disease-relevant impacts against obesity, hyperuricemia, NASH, and COVID-19, respectively. Importantly, DLEPS also uncovered the biological insight that the MEK-ERK signaling pathway should be understood as a target for developing anti-NASH agents. Beyond illustrating that DLEPS is an effective tool for drug repurposing and development with diverse diseases (including those lacking targets), our study shows how diverse transcriptomics datasets can be harnessed to identify inhibitors and activator chemicals that can expand the scope of biological investigations well beyond mutant-bases analyses. Overall design: mRNA profiles of kidney tissue after 14 days treatment at 10mg/kg/day of Perillen or vehicle in hyperuricemia mice.