Dissemin is shutting down on January 1st, 2025

Published in

Nature Research, Communications Biology, 1(6), 2023

DOI: 10.1038/s42003-023-04783-5

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Harmonizing across datasets to improve the transferability of drug combination prediction

This paper is made freely available by the publisher.
This paper is made freely available by the publisher.

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Abstract

AbstractCombination treatment has multiple advantages over traditional monotherapy in clinics, thus becoming a target of interest for many high-throughput screening (HTS) studies, which enables the development of machine learning models predicting the response of new drug combinations. However, most existing models have been tested only within a single study, and these models cannot generalize across different datasets due to significantly variable experimental settings. Here, we thoroughly assessed the transferability issue of single-study-derived models on new datasets. More importantly, we propose a method to overcome the experimental variability by harmonizing dose–response curves of different studies. Our method improves the prediction performance of machine learning models by 184% and 1367% compared to the baseline models in intra-study and inter-study predictions, respectively, and shows consistent improvement in multiple cross-validation settings. Our study addresses the crucial question of the transferability in drug combination predictions, which is fundamental for such models to be extrapolated to new drug combination discovery and clinical applications that are de facto different datasets.