Graph Neural Networks for Drug–Drug Interaction Prediction—Predicting Safe Drug Pairings with AI †

Abstract

At present, polypharmacy—which is the use of several medications to treat a single case at the same time—has become a fairly common medical practice, particularly in chronic illnesses or with older patients. But this relatively ‘faster’ form of treatment brings the problem of cumulative polypharmacy, which occurs when there is an increase in drug–drug interactions (DDIs) due to the large number of medicines taken. While the aftermath, such as the reduction in strength of medication taken or catastrophic and fatal responses to certain drugs, is clearly not worth the initial effort put into trying to ease the condition, attempting to resolve these issues requires excessive research. With these difficulties in mind, we describe our research that uses graph neural networks (GNNs) focused on DDI prediction by modeling drugs and their interactions in the form of graphs. The research is divided into two parts. In this research, the relevant literature is reviewed in order to understand how modern GNN-based algorithms can be applied for the detection of optimal drugs.