STDrug enables spatially informed personalized drug repurposing from spatial transcriptomics

, a spatially informed computational framework that integrates spatial transcriptomics, graph-based modeling, and multimodal learning to enable patient-specific therapeutic prioritization. STDrug identifies and aligns disease and control spatial domains using graph convolutional networks and coherent point drift, and prioritizes candidate drugs through an integrative scoring scheme combining tumor-reversible gene signatures, perturbation-based reversal scores, and knowledge-guided gene weighting within a machine learning framework. By modeling spatial domain interactions alongside predicted drug efficacy and toxicity, STDrug generates robust patient-level drug scores. Across hepatocellular carcinoma and prostate cancer datasets, STDrug outperforms existing single-cell and spatial transcriptomics-based drug repurposing methods, achieving signficantly improved predictive accuracy (AUCs=0.81-0.82) across patients. Validation using large-scale electronic health records and in vitro assays further supports the translational relevance of top-ranked candidates. Taking together, STDrug establishes a generalizable framework for incorporating spatial omics into therapeutic discovery, advancing spatially informed and personalized drug repurposing.

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Publication Details

Journal
bioRxiv (Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory)
Published
2026-04-07
DOI
https://doi.org/10.64898/2026.04.03.715101
Primary Topic
Single-cell and spatial transcriptomics
Type
article
Field-Weighted Citation Impact
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article

STDrug enables spatially informed personalized drug repurposing from spatial transcriptomics

Tianao Chen, Abdullah Karaaslanli, Hao Liang, Xuhui Guo et al.
bioRxiv (Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory)
Single-cell and spatial transcriptomics
article

STDrug enables spatially informed personalized drug repurposing from spatial transcriptomics

Tianao Chen, Abdullah Karaaslanli, Hao Liang, Xuhui Guo, Shu Zhou, Evan T. Keller, Suguru Kadomoto, Wanxing Zhang, Thatchayut Unjitwattana, Xiaotong Yang, Yiwen Yang, Yuheng Du, Lana X. Garmire
article en

Abstract

, a spatially informed computational framework that integrates spatial transcriptomics, graph-based modeling, and multimodal learning to enable patient-specific therapeutic prioritization. STDrug identifies and aligns disease and control spatial domains using graph convolutional networks and coherent point drift, and prioritizes candidate drugs through an integrative scoring scheme combining tumor-reversible gene signatures, perturbation-based reversal scores, and knowledge-guided gene weighting within a machine learning framework. By modeling spatial domain interactions alongside predicted drug efficacy and toxicity, STDrug generates robust patient-level drug scores. Across hepatocellular carcinoma and prostate cancer datasets, STDrug outperforms existing single-cell and spatial transcriptomics-based drug repurposing methods, achieving signficantly improved predictive accuracy (AUCs=0.81-0.82) across patients. Validation using large-scale electronic health records and in vitro assays further supports the translational relevance of top-ranked candidates. Taking together, STDrug establishes a generalizable framework for incorporating spatial omics into therapeutic discovery, advancing spatially informed and personalized drug repurposing.

bioRxiv (Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory)
University of Michigan (US), University of Alabama at Birmingham (US)
Good health and well-being
Openalex Percentile: Top 27%
Single-cell and spatial transcriptomics
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