← Back to Explore

EGFRNet: Transfer and Multi-task Learning Based on Graph Convolutional Network Toward Multi-target Drug Discovery Against Cancers for EGFR-Family Proteins

ISEF · 2021 Computational Biology and Bioinformatics First Award

Overview

The epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR) family proteins, consisting of HER1-4, are the most prominent causes of various human cancers, including breast, gastric, esophagus, lung, pancreatic, and bladder cancers. In addition, lung cancer treatments targeting HER1 protein can induce drug-resistant mutations. Currently, the standard drug discovery process encounters cost- and time-consuming challenges. However, the failures during research and development emerge from drug efficacy and safety problems. This scenario necessitates effective methods for discovering novel drugs to inhibit EGFR-family proteins. We herein developed models to predict bioactivity (pIC50) of kinase inhibitors against wild-type HER1-4 and mutant HER1 for multi-target drug discovery. Nevertheless, since the amount of training data is low, we employed transfer learning and multi-task learning techniques based on the LigEGFR model, the convolution spatial graph embedding network (C-SGEN) with deep neural network (DNN) algorithms trained on wild-type HER1. We performed the experiments by testing the average predictive performances through the RMSE and validated the models’ robustness by using the y-scrambling technique. This study showed the transfer learning models and the multi-task learning models yielded higher predictive performance than traditional machine learning models. Our models provide a powerful strategy that may potentially help researchers to discover novel drugs against EGFR-family proteins. Moreover, these techniques can also be applied to virtual drug screening by using machine learning for multi-target drug development with other proteins through small-scale experimental data.

Awards (1)

  • First Award of $5,000 $5,000

Competition history

  • ISEF 2021 Computational Biology and Bioinformatics · Entry CBIO084T

Resources

Related projects

Closest projects by meaning, across every fair and year in the corpus.

Source: Regeneron International Science and Engineering Fair

Save projects to your library

Sign in with Google to keep track of projects you find interesting, organized into folders. Browsing stays public.

Continue with Google