Weighted hypergraph learning and adaptive inductive matrix completion for SARS-CoV-2 drug repositioning.

Motivation: The outbreak of the human coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2) has placed a huge burden on public health and the world economy. Compared with de novo drug discovery, drug repurposing is a promising therapeutic strategy that facilitates rapid clinical treatment decisions, shortens the development process, and reduces costs.

Results: In this study, we propose a weighted hypergraph learning and adaptive inductive matrix completion method, WHAIMC, for predicting potential virus-drug associations. Firstly, we integrate multi-source data to describe viruses and drugs from multiple perspectives, including drug chemical structures, drug targets, virus complete genome sequences, and virus-drug associations. Then, WHAIMC establishes an adaptive inductive matrix completion model to improve performance through adaptive learning of similarity relations. Finally, WHAIMC introduces weighted hypergraph learning into adaptive inductive matrix completion to capture higher-order relationships of viruses (or drugs). The results showed that WHAIMC had a strong predictive performance for new virus-drug associations, new viruses, and new drugs. The case study further demonstrates that WHAIMC is highly effective for repositioning antiviral drugs against SARS-CoV-2 and provides a new perspective for virus-drug association prediction. The code and data in this study is freely available at https://github.com/Mayingjun20179/WHAIMC.