Drug Repositioning Based on the Enhanced Message Passing and Hypergraph Convolutional Networks

Drug repositioning, an important method of drug development, is utilized to discover investigational drugs beyond the originally approved indications, expand the application scope of drugs, and reduce the cost of drug development. With the emergence of increasingly drug-disease-related biological networks, the challenge still remains to effectively fuse biological entity data and accurately achieve drug-disease repositioning. This paper proposes a new drug repositioning method named EMPHCN based on enhanced message passing and hypergraph convolutional networks (HGCN). It firstly constructs the homogeneous multi-view information with multiple drug similarity features and then extracts the intra-domain embedding of drugs through the combination of HGCN and channel attention mechanism. Secondly, inter-domain information of known drug-disease associations is extracted by graph convolutional networks combining node and edge embedding (NEEGCN), and a heterogeneous network composed of drugs, proteins and diseases is built as an important auxiliary to enhance the inter-domain message passing of drugs and diseases. Besides, the intra-domain embedding of diseases is also extracted through HGCN. Ultimately, intra-domain and inter-domain embeddings of drugs and diseases are integrated as the final embedding for calculating the drug-disease correlation matrix. Through 10-fold cross-validation on some benchmark datasets, we find that the AUPR of EMPHCN reaches 0.593 (T1) and 0.526 (T2), respectively, and the AUC achieves 0.887 (T1) and 0.961 (T2) respectively, which shows that EMPHCN has an advantage over other state-of-the-art prediction methods. Concerning the new disease association prediction, the AUC of EMPHCN through the five-fold cross-validation reaches 0.806 (T1) and 0.845 (T2), which are 4.3% (T1) and 4.0% (T2) higher than the second best existing methods, respectively. In the case study, EMPHCN also achieves satisfactory results in real drug repositioning for breast carcinoma and Parkinson’s disease.