Drug target prediction from perturbation transcriptomics via a biological function-guided hypergraph siamese network

Understanding how small molecules modulate cellular states remains a critical challenge in drug discovery. The advent of perturbation transcriptomics offers new avenues for elucidating drug-target interactions by capturing cellular transcriptional responses to perturbations.

In this study, we propose BioHSNet, a biological function-guided hypergraph siamese network for inferring drug-target interactions from perturbation transcriptomics. BioHSNet utilizes hyperedge representations of functionally grouped gene expression to capture higher-order functional relationships, and integrates compound structural information into the model to bridge chemical structure and functional response. Experimental results demonstrate that BioHSNet outperforms other transcriptome-based methods on the Broad Institute's L1000 datasets, particularly in cold start scenarios. The case study further demonstrates its practical utility for target prediction and drug screening.

The source code is available at https://github.com/Zxinyizhang/BioHSNet.