Discovering new drugs is a complicated, time-consuming, costly, risky and failure-prone process. However, about 80% of the drugs that have been approved so far are targeted at protein targets, and 99% of them only target specific proteins. This means that there are still a large number of protein targets that are considered “useless”. By exploring miRNA as a potential therapeutic target, we can expand the range of target selection and improve the efficiency of drug development. Therefore, it is of great significance to search for potential miRNA-drug interactions (MDIs) through reasonable computational methods.

To solve the problems, a research team led by Xiujuan Lei published their new research on 15 May 2025 in Frontiers of Computer Science co-published by Higher Education Press and Springer Nature.

The team proposed a dual-channel network model, MDIDCN, based on Temporal Convolutional Network (TCN) and Bi-directional Long Short-Term Memory (BiLSTM), to predict MDIs.

Specifically, they first used a known bipartite network to represent the interaction between miRNAs and drugs, and the graph embedding technique of BiNE was applied to learn the topological features of both. Secondly, they used TCN to learn the MACCS fingerprints of drugs, BiLSTM to learn the k-mer of miRNA, and concatenated the topological and structural features of the two together as their fusion features. Finally, the fusion features of miRNA and drug underwent max-pooling, and they were input into the Softmax layer to obtain the predicted scores of both, so as to obtain the potential miRNA-drug interaction pairs.

In the research, the prediction performance of the model was evaluated on three different datasets by using 5-fold cross-validation, and the average AUC were 0.9567, 0.9365, and 0.8975, respectively. In addition, case studies on the drugs Gemcitabine and hsa-miR-155-5p were also conducted in this paper, and the results showed that the model had high accuracy and reliability. In conclusion, the MDIDCN model can accurately and efficiently predict MDIs, which has important implications for drug development.

In the future, the team will consider adding the side effect features of drugs and the physicochemical properties of miRNAs to further improve the predictive power of the model.

DOI: 10.1007/s11704-024-3862-1