Efficient screening of pharmacological broad-spectrum anti-cancer peptides utilizing advanced bidirectional Encoder

Yupeng Niu1,2, Zhenghao Li1,2, Ziao Chen3,2

  • 1College of Information Engineering, Sichuan Agricultural University, Ya'an 625000, China.

Heliyon
|May 20, 2024
PubMed

Insights

This study introduces a novel deep learning model for identifying Anticancer Peptides (ACPs), significantly improving screening efficiency. The advanced BERT model accelerates the discovery of targeted oncolytic therapeutics for precision oncology.

Area of Science:

  • Oncology
  • Bioinformatics
  • Computational Biology

Background:

  • Conventional Anticancer Peptide (ACP) identification is time-consuming and costly, hindering precision oncology.
  • There is a need for efficient and accurate methods to discover novel ACPs for targeted cancer therapy.

Purpose of the Study:

  • To develop a deep learning-based screening method for identifying Anticancer Peptides (ACPs).
  • To improve the efficiency and accuracy of ACP discovery for oncolytic therapeutics.

Main Methods:

  • Integration of Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Pseudo Amino Acid Composition (PseAAC) for ACP attribute extraction.
  • Development and optimization of a BERT model for ACP detection, surpassing existing methods.

Main Results:

  • The optimized BERT model demonstrated superior accuracy and selectivity in ACP detection.
  • Achieved high performance metrics: 0.9726 AUC and 0.9385 F1 score (5-fold CV), and 0.9848 AUC and 0.9371 F1 score (external validation).

Conclusions:

  • The proposed deep learning approach significantly reduces time and financial burdens in ACP research.
  • This method accelerates the discovery and clinical application of ACPs, advancing precision oncology.