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High drug development costs and the limited number of new annual drug approvals increase the need for innovative approaches for drug effect prediction. Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS‐CoV‐2), the cause of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID‐19), led to a global pandemic with high morbidity and mortality. Although effective preventive measures exist, there are few effective treatments for hospitalized patients with SARS‐CoV‐2 infection. Drug repurposing and drug effect prediction are promising strategies that could shorten development time and reduce costs compared with de novo drug discovery. In this work, we present a machine learning framework to integrate a variety of target network features and physicochemical properties of compounds, and analyze their influence on the therapeutic effects for SARS‐CoV‐2 infection and on host cell cytotoxic effects. Random forest models trained on compounds with known experimental effects on SARS‐CoV‐2 infection and subsequent feature importance analysis based on Shapley values provided insights into the determinants of drug efficacy and cytotoxicity, which can be incorporated into novel drug discovery approaches. Given the complexity of molecular mechanisms of drug action and limited sample sizes, our models achieve a reasonable mean area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (ROC‐AUC) of 0.73 on an unseen validation set. To our knowledge, this is the first work to incorporate a combination of network and physicochemical features of compounds into a machine learning model to predict drug effects on SARS‐CoV‐2 infection. Our systems pharmacology–based machine learning framework can be used to classify other existing drugs for SARS‐CoV‐2 infection and can easily be adapted to drug effect prediction for future viral outbreaks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Motivation In multi-cohort machine learning studies, it is critical to differentiate between effects that are reproducible across cohorts and those that are cohort-specific. Multi-task learning (MTL) is a machine learning approach that facilitates this differentiation through the simultaneous learning of prediction tasks across cohorts. Since multi-cohort data can often not be combined into a single storage solution, there would be the substantial utility of an MTL application for geographically distributed data sources. Results Here, we describe the development of 'dsMTL', a computational framework for privacy-preserving, distributed multi-task machine learning that includes three supervised and one unsupervised algorithms. First, we derive the theoretical properties of these methods and the relevant machine learning workflows to ensure the validity of the software implementation. Second, we implement dsMTL as a library for the R programming language, building on the DataSHIELD platform that supports the federated analysis of sensitive individual-level data. Third, we demonstrate the applicability of dsMTL for comorbidity modeling in distributed data. We show that comorbidity modeling using dsMTL outperformed conventional, federated machine learning, as well as the aggregation of multiple models built on the distributed datasets individually. The application of dsMTL was computationally efficient and highly scalable when applied to moderate-size (n  < 500), real expression data given the actual network latency. Availability and implementation dsMTL is freely available at https://github.com/transbioZI/dsMTLBase (server-side package) and https://github.com/transbioZI/dsMTLClient (client-side package). Supplementary information Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Machine learning and artificial intelligence have shown promising results in many areas and are driven by the increasing amount of available data. However, these data are often distributed across different institutions and cannot be easily shared owing to strict privacy regulations. Federated learning (FL) allows the training of distributed machine learning models without sharing sensitive data. In addition, the implementation is time-consuming and requires advanced programming skills and complex technical infrastructures., Objective: Various tools and frameworks have been developed to simplify the development of FL algorithms and provide the necessary technical infrastructure. Although there are many high-quality frameworks, most focus only on a single application case or method. To our knowledge, there are no generic frameworks, meaning that the existing solutions are restricted to a particular type of algorithm or application field. Furthermore, most of these frameworks provide an application programming interface that needs programming knowledge. There is no collection of ready-to-use FL algorithms that are extendable and allow users (eg, researchers) without programming knowledge to apply FL. A central FL platform for both FL algorithm developers and users does not exist. This study aimed to address this gap and make FL available to everyone by developing FeatureCloud, an all-in-one platform for FL in biomedicine and beyond., Methods: The FeatureCloud platform consists of 3 main components: a global frontend, a global backend, and a local controller. Our platform uses a Docker to separate the local acting components of the platform from the sensitive data systems. We evaluated our platform using 4 different algorithms on 5 data sets for both accuracy and runtime., Results: FeatureCloud removes the complexity of distributed systems for developers and end users by providing a comprehensive platform for executing multi-institutional FL analyses and implementing FL algorithms. Through its integrated artificial intelligence store, federated algorithms can easily be published and reused by the community. To secure sensitive raw data, FeatureCloud supports privacy-enhancing technologies to secure the shared local models and assures high standards in data privacy to comply with the strict General Data Protection Regulation. Our evaluation shows that applications developed in FeatureCloud can produce highly similar results compared with centralized approaches and scale well for an increasing number of participating sites., Conclusions: FeatureCloud provides a ready-to-use platform that integrates the development and execution of FL algorithms while reducing the complexity to a minimum and removing the hurdles of federated infrastructure. Thus, we believe that it has the potential to greatly increase the accessibility of privacy-preserving and distributed data analyses in biomedicine and beyond., (©Julian Matschinske, Julian Späth, Mohammad Bakhtiari, Niklas Probul, Mohammad Mahdi Kazemi Majdabadi, Reza Nasirigerdeh, Reihaneh Torkzadehmahani, Anne Hartebrodt, Balazs-Attila Orban, Sándor-József Fejér, Olga Zolotareva, Supratim Das, Linda Baumbach, Josch K Pauling, Olivera Tomašević, Béla Bihari, Marcus Bloice, Nina C Donner, Walid Fdhila, Tobias Frisch, Anne-Christin Hauschild, Dominik Heider, Andreas Holzinger, Walter Hötzendorfer, Jan Hospes, Tim Kacprowski, Markus Kastelitz, Markus List, Rudolf Mayer, Mónika Moga, Heimo Müller, Anastasia Pustozerova, Richard Röttger, Christina C Saak, Anna Saranti, Harald H H W Schmidt, Christof Tschohl, Nina K Wenke, Jan Baumbach. Originally published in the Journal of Medical Internet Research (https://www.jmir.org), 12.07.2023.)