Drug-drug interaction prediction of traditional Chinese medicine based on graph attention networks

Abstract Predicting drug–drug interactions (DDI) is crucial for preventing adverse reactions in patients and plays a vital role in drug design and development. However, traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) formulations, typically composed of multiple herbal ingredients with diverse bioactive compounds...

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Main Authors: Bin Yang, Dan Song, Yadong Li, Jinglong Wang
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: Nature Portfolio 2025-05-01
Series:Scientific Reports
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Online Access:https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-025-00725-9
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author Bin Yang
Dan Song
Yadong Li
Jinglong Wang
author_facet Bin Yang
Dan Song
Yadong Li
Jinglong Wang
author_sort Bin Yang
collection DOAJ
description Abstract Predicting drug–drug interactions (DDI) is crucial for preventing adverse reactions in patients and plays a vital role in drug design and development. However, traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) formulations, typically composed of multiple herbal ingredients with diverse bioactive compounds, present a unique challenge in comprehensively assessing potential adverse interactions among their components. To address this challenge, we propose a novel Dual Graph Attention Network (DGAT) designed to predict TCM drug-drug interactions (TCMDDI) by extracting key structural features of active molecules within the herbal ingredients. Our approach leverages graph-based representations of chemical molecules and employs attention mechanism to extract deep structural features, enabling the effective prediction of TCMDDI by capturing spatial structural relationships among different compounds. Furthermore, we construct a comprehensive dataset encompassing three different categories of herbal ingredients, informed by traditional TCM principles. Experimental results reveal that the proposed DGAT method significantly outperforms currently advanced deep learning techniques, including Graph Convolutional Networks, Weave, and Message Passing Neural Networks. Compared to traditional rule-based two-dimensional molecular descriptors, DGAT more effectively captures the spatial structural information of molecules. Notably, DGAT exhibits robust performance and strong generalizability on unseen samples, providing valuable insights for future research on TCMDDI prediction and advancing the integration of artificial intelligence in TCM studies.
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spelling doaj-art-6f08e1cd257a4f7f9fdfb6dfc2a055ef2025-08-20T03:22:09ZengNature PortfolioScientific Reports2045-23222025-05-0115111210.1038/s41598-025-00725-9Drug-drug interaction prediction of traditional Chinese medicine based on graph attention networksBin Yang0Dan Song1Yadong Li2Jinglong Wang3School of Information Science and Engineering, Zaozhuang UniversitySchool of Information Science and Engineering, Zaozhuang UniversitySchool of Information Science and Engineering, Zaozhuang UniversityCollege of Food Science and Pharmaceutical Engineering, Zaozhuang UniversityAbstract Predicting drug–drug interactions (DDI) is crucial for preventing adverse reactions in patients and plays a vital role in drug design and development. However, traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) formulations, typically composed of multiple herbal ingredients with diverse bioactive compounds, present a unique challenge in comprehensively assessing potential adverse interactions among their components. To address this challenge, we propose a novel Dual Graph Attention Network (DGAT) designed to predict TCM drug-drug interactions (TCMDDI) by extracting key structural features of active molecules within the herbal ingredients. Our approach leverages graph-based representations of chemical molecules and employs attention mechanism to extract deep structural features, enabling the effective prediction of TCMDDI by capturing spatial structural relationships among different compounds. Furthermore, we construct a comprehensive dataset encompassing three different categories of herbal ingredients, informed by traditional TCM principles. Experimental results reveal that the proposed DGAT method significantly outperforms currently advanced deep learning techniques, including Graph Convolutional Networks, Weave, and Message Passing Neural Networks. Compared to traditional rule-based two-dimensional molecular descriptors, DGAT more effectively captures the spatial structural information of molecules. Notably, DGAT exhibits robust performance and strong generalizability on unseen samples, providing valuable insights for future research on TCMDDI prediction and advancing the integration of artificial intelligence in TCM studies.https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-025-00725-9Dual graph attention networksTraditional Chinese medicine drug-drug interactionMolecule representation
spellingShingle Bin Yang
Dan Song
Yadong Li
Jinglong Wang
Drug-drug interaction prediction of traditional Chinese medicine based on graph attention networks
Scientific Reports
Dual graph attention networks
Traditional Chinese medicine drug-drug interaction
Molecule representation
title Drug-drug interaction prediction of traditional Chinese medicine based on graph attention networks
title_full Drug-drug interaction prediction of traditional Chinese medicine based on graph attention networks
title_fullStr Drug-drug interaction prediction of traditional Chinese medicine based on graph attention networks
title_full_unstemmed Drug-drug interaction prediction of traditional Chinese medicine based on graph attention networks
title_short Drug-drug interaction prediction of traditional Chinese medicine based on graph attention networks
title_sort drug drug interaction prediction of traditional chinese medicine based on graph attention networks
topic Dual graph attention networks
Traditional Chinese medicine drug-drug interaction
Molecule representation
url https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-025-00725-9
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AT dansong drugdruginteractionpredictionoftraditionalchinesemedicinebasedongraphattentionnetworks
AT yadongli drugdruginteractionpredictionoftraditionalchinesemedicinebasedongraphattentionnetworks
AT jinglongwang drugdruginteractionpredictionoftraditionalchinesemedicinebasedongraphattentionnetworks