MMFSyn: A Multimodal Deep Learning Model for Predicting Anticancer Synergistic Drug Combination Effect

Combination therapy aims to synergistically enhance efficacy or reduce toxic side effects and has widely been used in clinical practice. However, with the rapid increase in the types of drug combinations, identifying the synergistic relationships between drugs remains a highly challenging task. This paper proposes a novel deep learning model MMFSyn based on multimodal drug data combined with cell line features. Firstly, to ensure the full expression of drug molecular features, multiple modalities of drugs, including Morgan fingerprints, atom sequences, molecular diagrams, and atomic point cloud data, are extracted using SMILES. Secondly, for different modal data, a Bi-LSTM, gMLP, multi-head attention mechanism, and multi-scale GCNs are comprehensively applied to extract the drug feature. Then, it selects appropriate omics features from gene expression and mutation omics data of cancer cell lines to construct cancer cell line features. Finally, these features are combined to predict the synergistic anti-cancer drug combination effect. The experimental results verify that MMFSyn has significant advantages in performance compared to other popular methods, with a root mean square error of 13.33 and a Pearson correlation coefficient of 0.81, which indicates that MMFSyn can better capture the complex relationship between multimodal drug combinations and omics data, thereby improving the synergistic drug combination prediction.