Autoencoder-based drug synergy framework for malignant diseases

Drug combination emerges as a viable option for the treatment of malignant diseases. Drug combination outperforms monotherapy by improving therapeutic efficacy, reducing toxicity, and overcoming drug resistance. To find viable drug combinations it is difficult to traverse empirically because of enormous combinational space. Machine learning and deep learning approaches are used to uncover novel synergistic drug combinations in enormous combinational space. Here, AESyn, a novel autoencoder-based drug synergy framework for malignant diseases using a bag of words encoding is proposed. The bag of word encoding technique is used to extract drug-targeted genes. The framework utilized screening data from NCI-ALMANAC, and O’Neil datasets. Autoencoders take drug embeddings with drug-targeted genes as input for processing. The autoencoder in the proposed framework is used to extract drug features. The proposed framework is evaluated on classification and regression metrics. The performance of the proposed framework is compared with existing methods of drug synergy. According to the findings, the proposed framework achieved high performance with an accuracy of 95%, AUROC of 94.2%, and MAPE of 7.2. The autoencoder-based framework for malignant diseases using an encoding technique provides a stable, order-independent drug synergy prediction.