Interpretable prediction of drug-drug interactions via text embedding in biomedical literature

Polypharmacy is a promising approach for treating diseases, especially those with complex symptoms. However, it can lead to unexpected drug-drug interactions (DDIs), potentially reducing efficacy and triggering adverse drug reactions (ADRs). Predicting the risk of DDIs is crucial for ensuring safe drug use, particularly by identifying the types of DDIs and the mechanisms involved. Therefore, this study used biomedical literature to proposed hierarchical attention-based deep learning models to predict DDIs and their types. The proposed model consists of two components: drug embedding and DDI prediction. The drug embedding module extracts representation vectors that effectively capture drug properties using sentence and sequence embedding methods. For sentence embedding, a pre-trained biomedical language model is used to map drug-related sentences into vector space. For sequence embedding, sentence embedding vectors are sequentially fed into bidirectional long short-term memory with a hierarchical attention network, enabling the analysis of sentences relevant to DDI prediction while accounting for the order of the sentences. Finally, DDI prediction is performed using a deep neural network based on the sequence embedding vectors of a drug pair. Our model achieved high performances in the accuracy (0.85–0.90), AUROC (0.98–0.99), and AUPR (0.63–0.95) performance across 164 DDI types. Additionally, the proposed model showed improvements in up to 11 % in AUROC, and 8 % in AUPR. Furthermore, model interprets predictions by leveraging attention mechanisms and drug similarity. The results indicated that the model considered various factors beyond similarity to predict DDIs. These findings may help prevent unforeseen medical accidents and reduce healthcare costs by predicting detailed drug interaction types. © 2024 The Authors