Understanding drug-drug interactions is an essential step to reduce the risk of adverse drug events before clinical drug co-prescription. Existing methods, commonly integrating heterogeneous data to increase model performance, often suffer from a high model complexity, As such, how to elucidate the molecular mechanisms underlying drug-drug interactions while preserving rational biological interpretability is a challenging task in computational modeling for drug discovery. In this study, we attempt to investigate drug-drug interactions via the associations between genes that two drugs target. For this purpose, we propose a simple f drug target profile representation to depict drugs and drug pairs, from which an l2-regularized logistic regression model is built to predict drug-drug interactions. Furthermore, we define several statistical metrics in the context of human protein-protein interaction networks and signaling pathways to measure the interaction intensity, interaction efficacy and action range between two drugs. Large-scale empirical studies including both cross validation and independent test show that the proposed drug target profiles-based machine learning framework outperforms existing data integration-based methods. The proposed statistical metrics show that two drugs easily interact in the cases that they target common genes; or their target genes connect via short paths in protein-protein interaction networks; or their target genes are located at signaling pathways that have cross-talks. The unravelled mechanisms could provide biological insights into potential adverse drug reactions of co-prescribed drugs.
© 2021. The Author(s).