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

Abstract

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 450 K 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.