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Main Authors: Ramos, Diogo, Coutinho, Bruno, Magano, Duarte
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.20199
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author Ramos, Diogo
Coutinho, Bruno
Magano, Duarte
author_facet Ramos, Diogo
Coutinho, Bruno
Magano, Duarte
contents The systematic discovery of effective drug combinations is a challenging problem in modern pharmacology, driven by the combinatorial growth of potential pairings and dosage configurations. Network medicine, modeling diseases and drugs as interconnected modules of the human protein-protein interactome, has emerged as a new paradigm for understanding disease mechanisms and drug action. In this work, we propose a quantum annealing-based algorithm for identifying effective drug combinations. Underlying our approach is the biologically motivated principle of `Complementary Exposure', which posits that therapeutic drug combinations target distinct yet complementary regions of a disease module. We translate this into a quadratic unconstrained binary optimisation problem. We test our method for Diabetes Mellitus, Rheumatoid Arthritis, Asthma, and Brain Neoplasms, relying on experimentally validated drug combinations for these diseases. Our simulated quantum annealing experiments reveal that low-energy configurations align with biologically plausible combinations, demonstrating the algorithm's ability to generate novel predictions for drug combinations.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2512_20199
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Network-based prediction of drug combinations with quantum annealing
Ramos, Diogo
Coutinho, Bruno
Magano, Duarte
Quantum Physics
The systematic discovery of effective drug combinations is a challenging problem in modern pharmacology, driven by the combinatorial growth of potential pairings and dosage configurations. Network medicine, modeling diseases and drugs as interconnected modules of the human protein-protein interactome, has emerged as a new paradigm for understanding disease mechanisms and drug action. In this work, we propose a quantum annealing-based algorithm for identifying effective drug combinations. Underlying our approach is the biologically motivated principle of `Complementary Exposure', which posits that therapeutic drug combinations target distinct yet complementary regions of a disease module. We translate this into a quadratic unconstrained binary optimisation problem. We test our method for Diabetes Mellitus, Rheumatoid Arthritis, Asthma, and Brain Neoplasms, relying on experimentally validated drug combinations for these diseases. Our simulated quantum annealing experiments reveal that low-energy configurations align with biologically plausible combinations, demonstrating the algorithm's ability to generate novel predictions for drug combinations.
title Network-based prediction of drug combinations with quantum annealing
topic Quantum Physics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.20199