MARSY: a multitask deep-learning framework for prediction of drug combination synergy scores
Bibliographic record
Abstract
MOTIVATION: Combination therapies have emerged as a treatment strategy for cancers to reduce the probability of drug resistance and to improve outcomes. Large databases curating the results of many drug screening studies on preclinical cancer cell lines have been developed, capturing the synergistic and antagonistic effects of combination of drugs in different cell lines. However, due to the high cost of drug screening experiments and the sheer size of possible drug combinations, these databases are quite sparse. This necessitates the development of transductive computational models to accurately impute these missing values. RESULTS: Here, we developed MARSY, a deep-learning multitask model that incorporates information on the gene expression profile of cancer cell lines, as well as the differential expression signature induced by each drug to predict drug-pair synergy scores. By utilizing two encoders to capture the interplay between the drug pairs, as well as the drug pairs and cell lines, and by adding auxiliary tasks in the predictor, MARSY learns latent embeddings that improve the prediction performance compared to state-of-the-art and traditional machine-learning models. Using MARSY, we then predicted the synergy scores of 133 722 new drug-pair cell line combinations, which we have made available to the community as part of this study. Moreover, we validated various insights obtained from these novel predictions using independent studies, confirming the ability of MARSY in making accurate novel predictions. AVAILABILITY AND IMPLEMENTATION: An implementation of the algorithms in Python and cleaned input datasets are provided in https://github.com/Emad-COMBINE-lab/MARSY.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".