Drug-target binding affinity (DTA) prediction is an essential step in drug discovery. Drug-target protein binding occurs at specific regions between the protein and drug, rather than the entire protein and drug. However, existing deep-learning DTA prediction methods do not consider the interactions between drug substructures and protein sub-sequences. This work proposes GraphATT-DTA, a DTA prediction model that constructs the essential regions for determining interaction affinity between compounds and proteins, modeled with an attention mechanism for interpretability. We make the model consider the local-to-global interactions with the attention mechanism between compound and protein. As a result, GraphATT-DTA shows an improved prediction of DTA performance and interpretability compared with state-of-the-art models. The model is trained and evaluated with the Davis dataset, the human kinase dataset; an external evaluation is achieved with the independently proposed human kinase dataset from the BindingDB dataset.
Keywords: attention; binding affinity; deep learning; drug-target interaction; graph neural network.