DrugnomeAI is an ensemble machine-learning framework for predicting druggability of candidate drug targets

The druggability of targets is a crucial consideration in drug target selection. Here, we adopt a stochastic semi-supervised ML framework to develop DrugnomeAI, which estimates the druggability likelihood for every protein-coding gene in the human exome. DrugnomeAI integrates gene-level properties from 15 sources resulting in 324 features. The tool generates exome-wide predictions based on labelled sets of known drug targets (median AUC: 0.97), highlighting features from protein-protein interaction networks as top predictors. DrugnomeAI provides generic as well as specialised models stratified by disease type or drug therapeutic modality. The top-ranking DrugnomeAI genes were significantly enriched for genes previously selected for clinical development programs (p value <1×10^-308) and for genes achieving genome-wide significance in phenome-wide association studies of 450K UK Biobank exomes for binary (p value = 1.7×10^-5) and quantitative traits (p value = 1.6×10^-7). We accompany our method with a web application (http://drugnomeai.public.cgr.astrazeneca.com) to visualise the druggability predictions and the key features that define gene druggability, per disease type and modality.

Arwa Raies, Ewa Tulodziecka, James Stainer, Lawrence Middleton, Ryan S. Dhindsa, Pamela Hill, Ola Engkvist, Andrew R. Harper, Slavé Petrovski, Dimitrios Vitsios