A Deep Learning Model for Predicting Tumor Suppressor Genes and Oncogenes from PDB Structure

While cancer is a heterogeneous complex of distinct diseases, the common underlying mechanism for uncontrolled tumor growth is due to mutations in proto-oncogenes and the loss of the regulatory function of tumor suppression genes. In this paper we propose a novel deep learning model for predicting tumor suppression genes (TSGs) and proto-oncogenes (OGs) from their Protein Data Bank (PDB) three dimensional structures. Specifically, we develop a convolutional neural network (CNN) to classify the feature map sets extracted from the tertiary protein structures. Each feature map set represents particular biological features associated with the atomic coordinates appearing on the outer surface of protein’s three dimensional structure. The experimental results on the collected dataset for classifying TSGs and OGs demonstrate promising performance with 82.57% accuracy and 0.89 area under ROC curve. The initial success of the proposed model warrants further study to develop a comprehensive model to identify the cancer driver genes or events using the principle cancer genes (TSG and OG).