Emerging technologies for drug repurposing: Harnessing the potential of text and graph embedding approaches

Abstract

Drug repurposing is an approach to identifying new uses for existing drugs, where advanced computational methods, such as text and graph embedding techniques, are playing an ever-increasing role. This review provides a timely overview of these embedding methods for drug repurposing and discusses their integration with machine learning. Text embedding techniques, such as Word2Vec, FastText, BERT, and Doc2Vec, enable the analysis of biomedical literature and clinical data to discover potential drug-disease relationships. These methods convert textual data into numerical representations, allowing for similarity calculations and predictive modeling. Several successful applications of text embedding for drug repurposing are highlighted. In addition, graph embedding methods, such as Node2Vec and GraphSAGE, are being employed to convert complex biological knowledge graphs into vector representations. These representations facilitate various network analysis tasks, including predicting drug-target interactions and identifying hidden associations between drugs and diseases. Case studies in both technologies demonstrate their effectiveness in drug repurposing. The advantages and limitations of both text and graph embedding technologies, and their complementarity with traditional structure-based approaches have been discussed. Finally, text and graph embedding methods can be employed in conjunction with traditional approaches of computational methods, which can offer a promising path to identifying novel drug repurposing opportunities, particularly for rare diseases.