DeepConv-DTI: Prediction of drug-target interactions via deep learning with convolution on protein sequences

Identification of drug-target interactions (DTIs) plays a key role in drug discovery. The high cost and labor-intensive nature of in vitro and in vivo experiments have highlighted the importance of in silico-based DTI prediction approaches. In several computational models, conventional protein descriptors are shown to be not informative enough to predict accurate DTIs. Thus, in this study, we employ a convolutional neural network (CNN) on raw protein sequences to capture local residue patterns participating in DTIs. With CNN on protein sequences, our model performs better than previous protein descriptor-based models. In addition, our model performs better than the previous deep learning model for massive prediction of DTIs. By examining the pooled convolution results, we found that our model can detect binding sites of proteins for DTIs. In conclusion, our prediction model for detecting local residue patterns of target proteins successfully enriches the protein features of a raw protein sequence, yielding better prediction results than previous approaches.