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Record W4414084489 · doi:10.1038/s41551-025-01481-x

Combinatorial prediction of therapeutic perturbations using causally inspired neural networks

2025· article· en· W4414084489 on OpenAlexaff
Guadalupe Gonzalez, Xiang Lin, Isuru S. Herath, Kirill Veselkov, Michael M. Bronstein, Marinka Žitnik

Bibliographic record

VenueNature Biomedical Engineering · 2025
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldComputer Science
TopicComputational Drug Discovery Methods
Canadian institutionsArtificial Intelligence in Medicine (Canada)
FundersHarvard Data Science Initiative, Harvard UniversityHarvard UniversityAstraZenecaSanofiBill and Melinda Gates FoundationPfizerAdvanced Research Projects AgencyNational Institutes of HealthNational Science Foundation
KeywordsEmbeddingRepresentation (politics)Artificial neural networkGraphPerturbation (astronomy)Drug targetClinical phenotypeReversing

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Phenotype-driven approaches identify disease-counteracting compounds by analysing the phenotypic signatures that distinguish diseased from healthy states. Here we introduce PDGrapher, a causally inspired graph neural network model that predicts combinatorial perturbagens (sets of therapeutic targets) capable of reversing disease phenotypes. Unlike methods that learn how perturbations alter phenotypes, PDGrapher solves the inverse problem and predicts the perturbagens needed to achieve a desired response by embedding disease cell states into networks, learning a latent representation of these states, and identifying optimal combinatorial perturbations. In experiments in nine cell lines with chemical perturbations, PDGrapher identifies effective perturbagens in more testing samples than competing methods. It also shows competitive performance on ten genetic perturbation datasets. An advantage of PDGrapher is its direct prediction, in contrast to the indirect and computationally intensive approach common in phenotype-driven models. It trains up to 25× faster than existing methods, providing a fast approach for identifying therapeutic perturbations and advancing phenotype-driven drug discovery.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

How this classification was reachedexpand

Full frame machine prediction

Teacher imitation

Not 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.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.000
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.002
Version: metacan-v3-hybrid-931329e0061cValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Simulation or modeling · Consensus signal: Simulation or modeling
GenreCandidate signal: Methods · Consensus signal: Methods
Teacher disagreement score0.004
Threshold uncertainty score0.008

Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0000.002
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0010.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0010.001
Bibliometrics0.0010.000
Science and technology studies0.0000.000
Scholarly communication0.0000.001
Open science0.0010.000
Research integrity0.0010.001
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0020.000

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.

Opus teacher head0.011
GPT teacher head0.273
Teacher spread0.263 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.

The models applied no category: nothing in the taxonomy fit this work.
Study designSimulation or modeling
Domainnot available
GenreMethods

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".

Quick stats

Citations18
Published2025
Admission routes1
Has abstractyes

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