Biomarker discovery and drug repurposing in hepatocellular carcinoma through transcriptomics, machine learning,...

This study employed an integrative computational and systems biology framework to define a diagnostic gene signature for hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) and to explore its potential translational relevance in a hypothesis-generating manner. Differential expression analysis of transcriptomic data from 230 samples identified 2748 significantly differentially expressed genes (DEGs), including 2283 upregulated and 465 downregulated genes, with FGF4 (log2FC = 10.08) and REG1B (log2FC = 10.02) among the top hits. Four machine learning classifiers were trained using this signature and demonstrated consistently high predictive performance, with XGBoost emerging as the top-performing model (accuracy = 0.97, F1-score = 0.96, ROC-AUC = 0.981). Logistic Regression (L1) and Random Forest achieved comparable performance (ROC-AUC = 0.980 and 0.979, respectively), while SVM-linear also showed high robustness (ROC-AUC = 0.978). All models showed good calibration, with low Brier scores (<0.04) and precision consistently exceeding 0.90 across most recall thresholds, indicating strong but not perfect classification performance. SHAP-based explainability analysis was used to rank and prioritise the most influential predictors, refining the biomarker panel to 81 genes that collectively accounted for approximately 50 % of the model's explanatory contribution, and highlighting key downregulated predictors in HCC, including GDF2, COLEC10, BMP10, LRAT, and DNASE1L3. Protein-protein interaction and functional enrichment analyses revealed five major molecular clusters and provided systems-level insights into dysregulated biological processes associated with HCC. Drug-gene interaction mining mapped 78 target proteins to clinically relevant compounds, including tolrestat, alcuronium, metyrosine, and 4-phenylbutyric acid. Molecular docking suggested favorable binding propensities for several complexes, including alcuronium-3UON (-8.5 kcal/mol), tolrestat-1ZUA (-8.3 kcal/mol), metyrosine-2XSN (-6.7 kcal/mol), and 4-phenylbutyric acid-2NZ2 (-5.9 kcal/mol). A 100 ns molecular dynamics simulation of the tolrestat-AKR1B10 (1ZUA) complex indicated structural stability, with protein backbone RMSD stabilising at 1.5-3.0 Å, ligand RMSD at 0.6-1.4 Å, and persistent interactions involving Trp22, His110, Glu111, and Phe122. Physicochemical and pharmacokinetic profiling further prioritised tolrestat as a computationally favourable candidate (MW = 357.35, LogP = 3.64, TPSA = 81.86 Ų), exhibiting acceptable drug-likeness, high predicted gastrointestinal absorption, and low synthetic complexity (SA = 2.34), in contrast to alcuronium (MW = 666.89, SA = 7.86), which showed multiple rule violations. Collectively, this in silico study proposes a robust diagnostic gene signature for HCC and identifies tolrestat as a promising repurposing candidate that warrants experimental validation, demonstrating the utility of integrating machine learning, network biology, and molecular simulation in translational cancer research.