Background: Knowing the responses of a patient to drugs is essential to make personalized medicine practical. Since the current clinical drug response experiments are time-consuming and expensive, utilizing human genomic information and drug molecular characteristics to predict drug responses is of urgent importance. Although a variety of computational drug response prediction methods have been proposed, their effectiveness is still not satisfying.

Results: In this study, we propose a method called LGRDRP (Learning Graph Representation for Drug Response Prediction) to predict cell line-drug responses. At first, LGRDRP constructs a heterogeneous network integrating multiple kinds of information: cell line miRNA expression profiles, drug chemical structure similarity, gene-gene interaction, cell line-gene interaction and known cell line-drug responses. Then, for each cell line, learning graph representation and Laplacian feature selection are combined to obtain network topology features related to the cell line. The learning graph representation method learns network topology structure features, and the Laplacian feature selection method further selects out some most important ones from them. Finally, LGRDRP trains an SVM model to predict drug responses based on the selected features of the known cell line-drug responses. Our five-fold cross-validation results show that LGRDRP is significantly superior to the art-of-the-state methods in the measures of the average area under the receiver operating characteristics curve, the average area under the precision-recall curve and the recall rate of top-k predicted sensitive cell lines.

Conclusions: Our results demonstrated that the usage of multiple types of information about cell lines and drugs, the learning graph representation method, and the Laplacian feature selection is useful to the improvement of performance in predicting drug responses. We believe that such an approach would be easily extended to similar problems such as miRNA-disease relationship inference.