{"id":136505,"date":"2023-08-02T09:31:11","date_gmt":"2023-08-02T13:31:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.ucf.edu\/news\/?p=136505"},"modified":"2025-04-18T11:13:25","modified_gmt":"2025-04-18T15:13:25","slug":"ucf-researchers-are-advancing-ai-assisted-drug-discovery","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ucf.edu\/news\/ucf-researchers-are-advancing-ai-assisted-drug-discovery\/","title":{"rendered":"UCF Researchers Are Advancing AI-assisted Drug Discovery"},"content":{"rendered":"
色花堂 researchers<\/a> are advancing AI-assisted drug screening technology with a new method that not only improves their own model\u2019s predictive ability but also that of seven other state-of-the-art models.<\/p>\n This new method can be beneficial in accelerating the development of life-saving medicines that otherwise take billions of dollars and decades of time to produce.<\/p>\n The results were published recently in the journal Briefings in Bioinformatics<\/em>.<\/p>\n Their new model, BindingSite-AugmentedDTA, uses their previously reported model, AttentionsiteDTI<\/a>, as the first step of a two-step prediction approach.<\/p>\n \u201cA unique aspect of our approach is that it can be easily integrated with any deep learning-based prediction model, which allows for improved performance compared to using the prediction models alone,\u201d says study co-author Ozlem Garibay ’01MS ’08PhD<\/strong>, an assistant professor in the Department of Industrial Engineering and Management Systems.<\/p>\n \u201cBy integrating our approach with other state-of-the-art deep learning-based drug-target-affinity prediction models, we have shown significant improvement in prediction performance across multiple metrics,\u201d Garibay says. \u201cThis integration makes it a powerful tool for drug discovery research.\u201d<\/p>\n The researcher\u2019s AttentionsiteDTI model is a classification model specifically designed to determine two key aspects. First, it identifies whether a drug compound binds with a target protein, and second, it determines the specific binding site on the protein where the drug compound interacts.<\/p>\n Their improved BindingSite-AugmentedDTA model follows a two-step prediction approach in which the first step uses the AttentionsiteDTI model to identify the specific binding site on the protein.<\/p>\n In the second step, a regression prediction model is integrated to estimate the binding strength, or affinity, between the drug molecule and the identified protein binding site.<\/p>\n Garibay says that this combined approach enhances the accuracy of drug target affinity predictions by reducing the search space of potential-binding sites of the protein in the first step, thus making the binding affinity prediction more efficient and accurate.<\/p>\n The researchers validated the prediction power of their model through in-vitro experiments and used it to successfully predict binding affinity values between FDA-approved drugs and key proteins of SARS-CoV-2.<\/p>\n They also showed improved performance of state-of-the-art predictive models, such as GraphDTA, DGraphtDTA and DepGS, in finding the most probable binding sites of proteins when AttentionSiteDTI was included in the models compared to when it wasn\u2019t.<\/p>\n The researchers are working on a Python package that includes most of the drug-target interaction and drug-target affinity models and datasets, which is highly customizable.<\/p>\n \u201cThis will enable further high-quality research in the community by providing a convenient tool for researchers to develop and evaluate their models,\u201d Garibay says.<\/p>\n They also plan to make their largest model available online for inference.<\/p>\n \u201cThis will facilitate fast drug screening for biology and pharmaceutical researchers with limited computer science knowledge \u2014 allowing them to easily predict drug-target binding affinities and identify potential drug candidates,\u201d Garibay says. \u201cThis can potentially accelerate the drug discovery process and lead to the development of new treatments for various diseases.\u201d<\/p>\n Ozlem Garibay is an assistant professor of Industrial Engineering and Management Systems, part 色花堂\u2019s College of Engineering and Computer Science<\/a>, where she directs the Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence Research Lab. Prior to that, she served as the director of research technology. Her areas of research are big data, social media analysis, social cybersecurity, artificial social intelligence, human-machine teams, social and economic networks, network science, STEM education analytics, higher education economic impact and engagement, artificial intelligence, evolutionary computation and complex systems. She earned her master’s and doctorate in computer science from UCF.<\/p>\nHow it Works<\/h2>\n
Next Steps<\/h2>\n
About the Team<\/h2>\n