Multiple-molecule drug design based on systems biology approaches and deep neural network to mitigate human skin aging

Abstract

Human skin aging is affected by various biological signaling pathways, microenviron-ment factors and epigenetic regulations. With the increasing demand for cosmetics and pharmaceu-ticals to prevent or reverse skin aging year by year, designing multiple-molecule drugs for mitigating skin aging is indispensable. In this study, we developed strategies for systems medicine design based on systems biology methods and deep neural networks. We constructed the candidate ge-nomewide genetic and epigenetic network (GWGEN) via big database mining. After doing systems modeling and applying system identification, system order detection and principle network projec-tion methods with real time-profile microarray data, we could obtain core signaling pathways and identify essential biomarkers based on the skin aging molecular progression mechanisms. After-wards, we trained a deep neural network of drug–target interaction in advance and applied it to predict the potential candidate drugs based on our identified biomarkers. To narrow down the candidate drugs, we designed two filters considering drug regulation ability and drug sensitivity. With the proposed systems medicine design procedure, we not only shed the light on the skin aging molecular progression mechanisms but also suggested two multiple-molecule drugs for mitigating human skin aging from young adulthood to middle age and middle age to old age, respectively.