AMDGT: Attention aware multi-modal fusion using a dual graph transformer for drug–disease associations prediction

Abstract

Identification of new indications for existing drugs is crucial through the various stages of drug discovery. Computational methods are valuable in establishing meaningful associations between drugs and diseases. However, most methods predict the drug-disease associations based solely on similarity data, neglecting valuable biological and chemical information. These methods often use basic concatenation to integrate information from different modalities, limiting their ability to capture features from a comprehensive and in-depth perspective. Therefore, a novel multimodal framework called AMDGT was proposed to predict new drug associations based on dual-graph transformer modules. By combining similarity data and complex biochemical information, AMDGT understands the multimodal feature fusion of drugs and diseases effectively and comprehensively with an attention-aware modality interaction architecture. Extensive experimental results indicate that AMDGT surpasses state-of-the-art methods in real-world datasets. Moreover, case and molecular docking studies demonstrated that AMDGT is an effective tool for drug repositioning. Our code is available at GitHub: https://github.com/JK-Liu7/AMDGT.