BridgeSyn: a bridging fusion framework for drug combination synergy prediction.

Abstract

Drug combination is a promising therapeutic strategy for complex diseases. However, only a small fraction of potential drug combinations exhibit true synergistic effects, making the prediction of drug synergy a critical yet challenging task. In this study, we propose BridgeSyn, a novel bridge fusion framework for drug synergy prediction. BridgeSyn leverages the knowledge from pretrained biological language models to enrich both drug compound and cell line representations. We introduce a bridging fusion mechanism that employs a set of shared latent tokens derived from global features, serving as a semantic interface to effectively fuse the representations of drug pairs and cell lines. By combining biological prior knowledge with this fusion strategy, BridgeSyn can capture complex biological interactions and achieve superior prediction results. Extensive experiments on two public datasets demonstrate that BridgeSyn consistently outperforms existing computation methods.