Predicting Associations between circRNAs and Drug Sensitivity using Heterogeneous Graphs and Graph Attention Networks

Discovering associations between circular RNAs (circRNAs) and cellular drug sensitivity is essential for understanding drug efficacy and therapeutic resistance. Traditional experimental methods to verify such associations are costly and time-consuming. Thus, the development of efficient computational methods for predicting circRNA-drug associations is crucial. In this study, we introduce a novel computational predictor called HETACDA, aimed at predicting potential circRNA-drug sensitivity associations. HETACDA constructs a heterogeneous graph network, incorporating the characteristic structure graph of drugs and circRNAs, along with the circRNA-drug sensitivity topology graph. By employing a graph convolutional network, the drug embedding vector is computed from the molecular structure of the drug. Through a graph attention mechanism, HETACDA assigns distinct attention weights to nodes in order to emphasize the contribution of various neighborhood nodes to the central node. Subsequently, an association score between circRNA-drug sensitivity is predicted using a three-layer fully connected neural network. Extensive experimental comparisons against several state-of-the-art methods highlight the effectiveness of our proposed framework. The availability of our source code and datasets on GitHub (https://github.com/xiaoxiaojun131421/HETACDA) facilitates replication and further research in this area.