CrossSG-DTA: Synergizing Sequence Semantics and Graph Structures via Cross-Attention for Drug-Target Affinity...

Accurate prediction of drug-target affinities (DTA) is critical for drug discovery. However, this task remains a significant challenge due to the complexity of modeling interactions between small ligands and large targets. In this study, we propose a multi-modal deep learning framework (CrossSG-DTA) to predict drug-target affinity by integrating sequence semantics with graph structural information. We leverage ChemBERTa and ESM-2 to extract rich semantic features for drugs and targets, respectively. In addition, a modified Graph Convolutional Network (GCN) is utilized to simultaneously capture structural data. To effectively fuse these heterogeneous features, we design a new symmetric dual cross-attention fusion mechanism for drugs and targets. This mechanism enables the model to capture complex dependencies between global sequence representations and local topological structures. Subsequently, the fused drug and target features are concatenated and fed into a three-layer Multi-Layer Perceptron (MLP) to obtain the final binding affinity. Experimental results on the Davis and KIBA datasets demonstrate that CrossSG-DTA significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods. Finally, a case study on a glaucoma-related target highlights the practical utility of our model as a powerful in silico tool for DTA tasks.