Improving Predictive Efficacy for Drug Resistance in Novel HIV-1 Protease Inhibitors through Transfer Learning Mechanisms

The human immunodeficiency virus presents a significant global health challenge due to its rapid mutation and the development of resistance mechanisms against antiretroviral drugs. Recent studies demonstrate the impressive performance of machine learning (ML) and deep learning (DL) models in predicting the drug resistance profile of specific FDA-approved inhibitors. However, generalizing ML and DL models to learn not only from isolates but also from inhibitor representations remains challenging for HIV-1 infection. We propose a novel drug-isolate-fold change (DIF) model framework that aims to predict drug resistance score directly from the protein sequence and inhibitor representation. Various ML and DL models, inhibitor representations, and protein representations were analyzed through realistic validation mechanisms. To enhance the molecular learning capacity of DIF models, we employ a transfer learning approach by pretraining a graph neural network (GNN) model for activity prediction on a data set of 4855 HIV-1 protease inhibitors (PIs). By performing various realistic validation strategies on internal and external genotype–phenotype data sets, we statistically show that the learned representations of inhibitors improve the predictive ability of DIF-based ML and DL models. We achieved an accuracy of 0.802, AUROC of 0.874, and r of 0.727 for the unseen external PIs. By comparing the DIF-based models with a null model consisting of isolate-fold change (IF) architecture, it is observed that the DIF models significantly benefit from molecular representations. Combined results from various testing strategies and statistical tests confirm the effectiveness of DIF models in testing novel PIs for drug resistance in the presence of an isolate.