idw – Informationsdienst Wissenschaft
Nachrichten, Termine, Experten
Nachrichten, Termine, Experten
A new artificial intelligence (AI) method called BioPathNet helps researchers systematically search large biological data networks for hidden connections – from gene functions and disease mechanisms to potential therapeutic approaches. BioPathNet was developed by teams at Helmholtz Munich and Mila – Quebec Artificial Intelligence Institute in Montreal, Canada. The researchers are now presenting the method in the journal Nature Biomedical Engineering.
Interpretable AI Connects Genes, Diseases, and Drugs
Biomedical “knowledge graphs” are structured maps that link genes, proteins, diseases, drugs, and biological processes, capturing their relationships to help both humans and AI understand biology and medicine in a systematic way. However, these networks remain incomplete: many relationships that researchers expect to exist have not yet been documented.
BioPathNet is an AI method for analysing such biomedical knowledge graphs. Unlike many existing approaches, it does not just look at individual data points but at entire chains of relationships – for example from a gene, via a signaling pathway, to a disease and on to a potential drug. “From thousands of these patterns, the model learns which new, biologically plausible connections are likely,” says Emy Yue Hu, first author of the study and a PhD student at the Institute of Computational Biology (ICB) at Helmholtz Munich. “On this basis, BioPathNet proposes hypotheses that we can then test in the lab or in clinical studies.” A key advantage of BioPathNet is that its predictions are interpretable: for each suggestion, the model can trace which paths in the knowledge graph led to that prediction.
Turning Data Points into Testable Hypotheses
In extensive tests, the team led by Dr. Annalisa Marsico, group leader at ICB and principal investigator of the project, applied BioPathNet to a wide range of tasks: predicting gene functions, uncovering relationships between diseases, identifying potential targets for cancer therapy and suggesting new indications for established drugs. For complex diseases such as leukaemia, gastric cancer and Alzheimer’s disease, BioPathNet not only rediscovered known therapies but also highlighted compounds that are already being tested in clinical trials. “It was crucial for us not to build yet another black-box model,” stresses Marsico. “For every prediction we can inspect the most important paths in the graph and discuss with domain experts whether they make biological sense.”
BioPathNet is therefore not an automatic recommendation engine for therapies, but a hypothesis-generating tool: the quality of its suggestions depends on the underlying data, and every predicted connection must be validated experimentally or clinically. In the long term, the researchers see the method as a building block towards foundation models for biomedical knowledge graphs that can be fine-tuned for many different tasks – from drug repurposing and the dissection of disease mechanisms to applications beyond medicine. “Our goal is not a miracle cure powered by AI,” says Marsico. “We want a tool that helps us make better use of existing biomedical data networks and come up with good new ideas for experiments and therapies.”
Bridging Disciplines to Build BioPathNet
The idea for BioPathNet emerged during a research stay by Emy Yue Hu at Mila. She had originally planned to work there on an air pollution project, but the available data turned out not to be suitable. Together with her supervisors she looked for a new, data-driven research question – and arrived at large biomedical knowledge graphs, which already contain a great deal of scattered information on genes, diseases and therapies. The team’s expertise in machine learning at Mila was crucial for developing the algorithms underlying BioPathNet, which is built on the NBFNet graph neural network framework, ensuring both predictive power and interpretability. “BioPathNet was only possible because of the interdisciplinarity of the team,” says Hu. “Experts in computational biology, mathematics, biophysics and computer science worked closely together across the sites in Montreal and Munich.” As an open-source tool, BioPathNet is now available to researchers worldwide to explore biomedical mechanisms.
About Helmholtz Munich
Helmholtz Munich is a leading biomedical research center. Its mission is to develop breakthrough solutions for better health in a rapidly changing world. Interdisciplinary research teams focus on environmentally triggered diseases, especially the therapy and prevention of diabetes, obesity, allergies, and chronic lung diseases. With the power of artificial intelligence and bioengineering, researchers accelerate the translation to patients. Helmholtz Munich has more than 2,550 employees and is headquartered in Munich/Neuherberg. It is a member of the Helmholtz Association, with more than 46,000 employees and 18 research centers the largest scientific organization in Germany. More about Helmholtz Munich (Helmholtz Zentrum München Deutsches Forschungszentrum für Gesundheit und Umwelt GmbH): www.helmholtz-munich.de/en
Hu et al., 2026: Enhancing link prediction in biomedical knowledge graphs with BioPathNet. Nature Biomedical Engineering. DOI: 10.1038/s41551-025-01598-z
Criteria of this press release:
Journalists, Scientists and scholars
Biology, Medicine
transregional, national
Research results, Scientific Publications
English
You can combine search terms with and, or and/or not, e.g. Philo not logy.
You can use brackets to separate combinations from each other, e.g. (Philo not logy) or (Psycho and logy).
Coherent groups of words will be located as complete phrases if you put them into quotation marks, e.g. “Federal Republic of Germany”.
You can also use the advanced search without entering search terms. It will then follow the criteria you have selected (e.g. country or subject area).
If you have not selected any criteria in a given category, the entire category will be searched (e.g. all subject areas or all countries).
