Directeur.e(s) de recherche
Elsa Rousseau
Start date
Title of the research project
Full characterization of drug-drug interactions using deep learning approaches
Description

The characterization of Drug-Drug interactions (DDIs) is crucial for planning therapies and drugs
co-administration. While considerable efforts are spent in labor-intensive in vivo experiments and time-consuming clinical trials, understanding the pharmacological implications and adverse side-effects for some drug combinations is challenging. The joint impact of the majority of combinations remains undetected until therapies are prescribed to patients. This raises the need for computational tools predicting DDIs in order to reduce experimental costs and exhaustively characterize all drug combination effects before therapy recommendations. 
Previous attempts to build such tools focused on pharmacodynamic and pharmacokinetic interactions and used features that are difficult to access in the early stages of R&D. 
In this work, we propose to use data about the drugs and their targets (pathways, biomarkers, gene expressions, etc) that are available at the beginning of each drug R&D campaign. Our hypothesis is that high-level deep learning features extracted from those data will improve DDI characterization. Therefore, our models will be trained to output the pharmacological effects of DDIs as well as underlying molecular and biological pathway interactions. 
Creating such a comprehensive toolkit will help to reduce risks in polypharmacy therapies.
 

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