Application of artificial neural networks to infer pharmacological molecular-level mechanisms of drug evoked clinical responses
The pRED Clinical Pharmacology Disease Modelling Group (CPDMG) aims to better understand the biological basis of inter-patient variability of clinical response to drugs. Improved understanding of how our drugs drive clinical responses informs which combination dosing regimens (“right drugs”) specific patient populations (“right patients”) are most likely to benefit from. Drug evoked responses are driven by drug-molecular-target interactions that perturb target functions. These direct, “proximal effects” (typically activation and/or inhibition of protein function) propagate across the biological processes these targets participate in via “distal effects” to drive clinical responses. Clinical Systems Pharmacology approaches are used by CPDMG to predict the mechanisms by which drug combinations evoke observed clinical responses. Over the last 5 years, CPDMG has successfully applied these approaches to inform key decisions across clinical development programs. Implementation of these approaches requires: (i) integration of prior relevant biological/clinical knowledge with large clinical and “omics” datasets; (ii) application of supervised machine learning (specifically, Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs)) to transform this knowledge/data into actionable, clinically relevant, mechanistic insights. In this presentation, key features of these approaches will be discussed by way of clinical examples. This will provide a framework for outlining the current limitations of these approaches and how we plan to address them in the future.
Date: 14 February 2020, 14:00 (Friday, 4th week, Hilary 2020)
Venue: Mathematical Institute, Woodstock Road OX2 6GG
Venue Details: L3
Speaker: Dr Jonathan Wagg (Roche Pharmaceutical Research and Early Development)
Organising department: Mathematical Institute
Organiser: Sara Jolliffe (University of Oxford)
Organiser contact email address: sara.jolliffe@maths.ox.ac.uk
Host: Dr Peter Minary (University of Oxford)
Part of: Mathematical Biology and Ecology
Booking required?: Not required
Audience: Public
Editor: Sara Jolliffe