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DeepVul: A Multi-Task Transformer Model for Joint Prediction of Gene Essentiality and Drug Response

Jararweh, A.; Arredondo, D.; Macaulay, O.; Dicome, M.; Tafoya, L.; Hu, Y.; Virupakshappa, K.; Boland, G.; Flaherty, K.; Sahu, A.

2024-10-21 bioinformatics
10.1101/2024.10.17.618944 bioRxiv
Show abstract

Despite their potential, current precision oncology approaches benefit only a small fraction of patients due to their limited focus on actionable genomic alterations. To expand its applicability, we propose DeepVul, a multi-task transformer-based model designed to predict gene essentiality and drug response from cancer transcriptome data. DeepVul aligns gene expressions, gene perturbations, and drug perturbations into a latent space, enabling simultaneous and accurate prediction of cancer cell vulnerabilities to numerous genes and drugs. Benchmarking against existing precision oncology approaches revealed that Deep-Vul not only matches but also complements oncogene-defined precision methods. Through interpretability analyses, DeepVul identifies underlying mechanisms of treatment response and resistance, as demonstrated with BRAF vulnerability prediction. By leveraging whole-genome transcriptome data, DeepVul enhances the clinical actionability of precision oncology, aiding in the identification of optimal treatments across a broader range of cancer patients. DeepVul is publicly available at https://github.com/alaaj27/DeepVul.git.

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