NetMedGPT - A network medicine foundation model for extensive disease mechanism mining and drug repurposing

Abstract

Network medicine leverages large biomedical knowledge graphs (KGs) to model disease mechanisms and identify therapeutic opportunities. However, most deep learning approaches that use KGs in biomedicine remain task-specific, limiting their ability to generalize across diverse applications within a unified framework. Here, we introduce NetMedGPT, a transformer-based foundation model trained on a large-scale biomedical KG using masked token prediction. By learning contextualized representations of biomedical nodes, NetMedGPT enables unified, zero-shot inference across different drug discovery tasks. Specifically, in five tasks, i.e., predicting the association of drugs with indications, targets, adverse drug reactions, contraindications, and off-label uses, NetMedGPT consistently outperforms all specialized baselines, achieving area under the precision-recall curve gains of between 2.2% and 26%. When evaluated on independent external datasets, NetMedGPT outperformed baseline on an expert-curated clinical indications set and also preferentially prioritized clinically relevant drug-disease pairs in ClinicalTrials.gov. NetMedGPTs generative capability further supports the construction of mechanistically plausible subnetworks offering biological insights. NetMedGPT provides a unified foundation model for network medicine that supports scalable hypothesis generation and provides potential to accelerate drug repurposing. We further provided an interactive interface (https://prototypes.cosy.bio/chatnetmedgpt/) that allows users to obtain model inferences through natural-language queries.