PrePR-CT: Predicting Perturbation Responses in Unseen Cell Types Using Cell-Type-Specific Graphs

Predicting the transcriptional response of chemical perturbations is crucial to understanding gene function and developing drug candidates, promising a streamlined drug development process. Single-cell sequencing has provided an ideal data basis for training machine learning models for this task. Recent advances in deep learning have led to significant improvements in predictions of chemical as well as genetic perturbations at the single cell level. Experiments have shown that different cell types exhibit distinct transcriptional patterns and responses to perturbation. This poses a fundamental problem for predicting transcriptional responses of drugs or cell types outside the training data. Accordingly, existing methods lack cell-type-specific modeling or do not explicitly provide an interpretable mechanism for the gene features. In this study, we introduce a novel approach that employs a network representation of various cell types as an inductive bias, improving prediction performance in scenarios with limited data while acknowledging cellular differences. We applied our framework to four small-scale single-cell perturbation datasets and one large-scale screening experiment, demonstrating that this representation can inherently generalize to previously unseen cell types. Furthermore, our method outperforms the state-of-the-art methods in predicting the post-perturbation response in unobserved cell types.