Molecular Fragment-Based Graph Isomorphism Networks for Interpretable Prediction of Synergistic Drug Combinations

Abstract

Drug combination therapy plays an increasingly important role in the clinical treatment of complex diseases, such as cancer, as rational drug combinations can enhance therapeutic efficacy and reduce toxic side effects. However, existing methods still exhibit limitations in the granularity of drug molecular representation, drug interaction modeling, and cell line context awareness, which restrict further improvements in predictive performance. To address these issues, we propose FragSyn, a deep graph learning framework for predicting synergistic drug combinations based on molecular fragmentations. FragSyn first decomposes drug molecules into chemically meaningful fragments according to breaks of retrosynthetically interesting chemical substructure rules and learns fragment-level molecular representations through a graph isomorphism network with edge features. It then captures nonlinear relationships between drug pairs from multiple perspectives while introducing a gating modulation mechanism conditioned on cell line features, enabling drug representations to adapt dynamically to the cell line context. Finally, multisource features are fused to perform binary classification of synergy versus antagonism. FragSyn achieves AUC, AUPR, and ACC of 0.944, 0.942, and 0.872, respectively, outperforming eight baseline models, and demonstrates optimal generalization performance in both leave-one-out cross-validation and external validation. Ablation studies and interpretability analyses further validate the rationality of FragSyn and its ability to identify key fragments. These results indicate that FragSyn, through the synergistic design of fragment-level representation and cellular context awareness, provides an effective and interpretable new approach to synergistic drug combination prediction.