OligoGraph: A novel geometric graph-based approach for siRNA efficacy prediction

RNA interference (RNAi) is a biological process in which a small interfering RNA (siRNA) prevents the translation of a messenger RNA (mRNA) into a protein by cleaving the mRNA before translation. We exploit this process to prevent the formation of harmful proteins by using an effective siRNA on the target mRNA. The current rapidly emerging RNAi-based drugs show immense potential for therapeutic applications. Traditionally, designing a potent siRNA for an mRNA requires extensive lab experimentation and trials; therefore, there is a need to develop a model that reliably predicts a siRNAs efficacy against mRNA. This saves both cost and time. But designing such models is challenging, as the data available is either scarce or biased. The current models available exhibit limited generalization and are restricted to a fixed siRNA lengths of either 19 or 21 nucleotides, limiting flexible use. To address these challenges, we introduce OligoGraph, a graph-based deep learning architecture that operates on the siRNA-mRNA duplex. It leverages RiNALMo embeddings, multiple GATconv and Transformerconv layers, and self-supervised pretraining, and outperforms all other existing models in our testing on seen and unseen data. We implemented specialized OligoGraph variants for 19- and 21-nucleotide siRNAs, both of which outperformed the current state-of-the-art models on unseen data. The 19-nucleotide model yielded AUC-ROC and PCC increases of 1.1% and 4.6% on the Mixset; 19.07% and 127.3% on the Takayuki dataset, respectively. Furthermore, the 21-nucleotide model improved predictive performance on the Simone dataset by 2.62% (AUC-ROC) and 6.65% (PCC).