Repurposing Drugs for Alzheimer's Diseases through Link Prediction on Biomedical Literature

Recently, computational drug repurposing has emerged as a promising method for identifying new interventions for diseases. This study predicts novel drugs for Alzheimer's disease (AD) through link prediction on our developed biomedical knowledge graph. We constructed a comprehensive knowledge graph containing AD concepts and various potential interventions, called ADInt, by integrating a dietary supplement (DS) domain knowledge graph, SuppKG, with semantic triples from SemMedDB database. Four knowledge graph embedding models (TransE, RotatE, DistMult and ComplEX) and two graph convolutional network models (R-GCN and CompGCN) were compared to learn the representation of ADInt. R-GCN outperformed other models by evaluating on the time slice test set and the clinical trial test set, and was used to generate the score tables for the link prediction task. According to the results of link prediction, we proposed candidate drugs for AD. In conclusion, we presented a novel methodology to extend an existing knowledge graph and discover novel drugs for AD. Our method can potentially be applied to other clinical problems, such as discovering drug adverse reactions and drug-drug interactions.