Polypharmacy requires accurate prediction of drug-drug interactions to prevent adverse events, yet existing models often lack reliability and explainability. We propose T-DDI, a descriptor-based deep learning framework for multi-class drug-drug interaction prediction. Rather than relying on complex graph embeddings, T-DDI uses explicit physicochemical descriptors and an uncertainty-aware estimator to handle severe class imbalance. Evaluated on 868,069 drug pairs spanning 178 interaction types, T-DDI achieves a Macro F1 of 0.8452 on the held-out test set, improving to 0.8992 within the high-confidence subset (87.91% of test samples), outperforming all evaluated baselines within the architectures and datasets considered here. An illustrative prospective case-study assessment on five newly FDA-approved drugs from late 2025 showed that T-DDI can generate mechanistically plausible DDI hypotheses for compounds not used during model development. T-DDI pairs confidence-stratified predictions with LIME-based feature-level explanations and a web application for screening, supporting more reliable drug safety monitoring.
Q. Kha, Duc-Quang-Anh Nguyen, Phi Pham Van Hoang et al.· npj Digital Medicine· 0 citations
Abstract Motivation Drug–target interaction (DTI) prediction is a crucial step in modern drug discovery. Accurate and efficient predictions can substantially reduce costs and development time. Applications of deep learning methods for this purpose have been extensively studied in recent years, yielding instrumental contributions to this field. However, existing methods face issues pertaining to efficient learning of drug and target feature representations, which is detrimental to generalizability and performance in cold-start scenarios. Most approaches extract representations from SMILES strings for drugs and FASTA sequences for target proteins, which encode limited 3D structural information. Additionally, many models lack explainability, being black boxes that provide little physical insight into the underlying mechanisms behind such interactions. Results We propose 3DICE, a novel framework leveraging co-attention-based fusion and massively pre-trained 3D structural encoders for both drugs and proteins. Uni-Mol and ESM-IF1 are employed to generate high-fidelity, 3D structure-aware embeddings which enable richer geometric and chemical understanding. Cross-modal fusion modules further augment representations to model intermolecular binding relationships. Importantly, this mechanism also provides intrinsic interpretability, highlighting and enabling qualitative analysis of most influential atoms or residues. Experiments conducted on two canonical benchmark datasets display the competitiveness of our model in real-world scenarios. 3DICE outperformed state-of-the-art models across multiple metrics on the DrugBank and KIBA datasets. Additional experiments provide a more rigorous analysis of interpretability than is typically reported in prior DTI studies, and we find that attention consistently highlights decision-critical regions which is not intrinsically class-specific. Availability Our model and dataset are freely available at: https://github.com/austinatose/3DICE.
Austin Zi Rui Liu, N. Le, M. C. H. Chua· Bioinformatics· 1 citation