Learning motif-based graphs for drug–drug interaction prediction via local–global self-attention

Unexpected drug–drug interactions (DDIs) are important issues for both pharmaceutical research and clinical applications due to the high risk of causing severe adverse drug reactions or drug withdrawals. Many deep learning models have achieved high performance in DDI prediction, but model interpretability to reveal the underlying causes of DDIs has not been extensively explored. Here we propose MeTDDI—a deep learning framework with local–global self-attention and co-attention to learn motif-based graphs for DDI prediction. MeTDDI achieved competitive performance compared with state-of-the-art models. Regarding interpretability, we conducted extensive assessments on 73 drugs with 13,786 DDIs and MeTDDI can precisely explain the structural mechanisms for 5,602 DDIs involving 58 drugs. Besides, MeTDDI shows potential to explain complex DDI mechanisms and mitigate DDI risks. To summarize, MeTDDI provides a new perspective on exploring DDI mechanisms, which will benefit both drug discovery and polypharmacy for safer therapies for patients. A transformer-based approach that predicts drug–drug interactions in polypharmacy has been shown, which also identifies perpetrator drugs and the chemical mechanisms causing the interactions. The method could facilitate high-throughput optimization of drug combinations and mitigate adverse drug–drug interaction risks.