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  <front>
    <journal-meta>
      <journal-id journal-id-type="iso-abbrev">Pharmacophore</journal-id>
      <journal-id journal-id-type="publisher-id">pharmacophorejournal.com</journal-id>
      <journal-id journal-id-type="publisher-id">Pharmacophore</journal-id>
      <journal-title-group>
        <journal-title>Pharmacophore</journal-title>
      </journal-title-group>
      <issn pub-type="epub">2229-5402</issn>
    </journal-meta>
    <article-meta>
      <article-id pub-id-type="publisher-id">pharmacophorejournal.com-6862</article-id>
      <article-id pub-id-type="doi">10.51847/0ih6F5zcFs</article-id>
      <article-categories>
        <subj-group subj-group-type="heading">
          <subject>Original research</subject>
        </subj-group>
      </article-categories>
      <title-group>
        <article-title>Explainable Drug Repurposing Models Using Transcriptomics, Drug Signatures, Pathways, and Target Networks</article-title>
      </title-group>
                    <contrib-group>
                      <contrib contrib-type="author">
              <name>
                <surname>Ramirez</surname>
                <given-names>Carlos</given-names>
              </name>
                              <xref rid="aff1" ref-type="aff">1</xref>
                                                            <xref rid="cor1" ref-type="corresp" />
                          </contrib>
                      <contrib contrib-type="author">
              <name>
                <surname>Torres</surname>
                <given-names>Elena</given-names>
              </name>
                              <xref rid="aff2" ref-type="aff">2</xref>
                                        </contrib>
                      <contrib contrib-type="author">
              <name>
                <surname>Ortega</surname>
                <given-names>Pablo</given-names>
              </name>
                              <xref rid="aff1" ref-type="aff">1</xref>
                                        </contrib>
                      <contrib contrib-type="author">
              <name>
                <surname>Mendes</surname>
                <given-names>Sofia</given-names>
              </name>
                              <xref rid="aff3" ref-type="aff">3</xref>
                                        </contrib>
                  </contrib-group>
                  <aff id="aff1">
            <label>1</label>Department of Pharmaceutical AI and Drug Analytics, Faculty of Pharmacy, University of Barcelona, Barcelona, Spain.
          </aff>
                  <aff id="aff2">
            <label>2</label>Department of Computational Drug Sciences, Faculty of Pharmacy, University of Lisbon, Lisbon, Portugal.
          </aff>
                  <aff id="aff3">
            <label>3</label>Department of Intelligent Pharmaceutical Systems, Faculty of Pharmacy, University of Porto, Porto, Portugal.
          </aff>
                          <author-notes>
            <corresp id="cor1">
              <bold>Address for correspondence:</bold> Prof. Wael Abu Dayyih, Department of
              Pharmaceutical Chemistry, Faculty of Pharmacy, Mutah University, Al-Karak 61710, Jordan.
                              E-mail: <email xlink:href="carlos.ramirez@gmail.com">carlos.ramirez@gmail.com</email>
                          </corresp>
          </author-notes>
                    <pub-date pub-type="epub">
        <day>28</day>
        <month>06</month>
        <year>2025</year>
      </pub-date>
      <volume>16</volume>
      <issue>3</issue>
      <fpage>32</fpage>
      <lpage>41</lpage>
      <permissions>
        <copyright-statement>
          Copyright: &#x000a9; 2026 Pharmacophore
        </copyright-statement>
        <copyright-year>2026</copyright-year>
        <license>
          <ali:license_ref xmlns:ali="http://www.niso.org/schemas/ali/1.0/"
            specific-use="textmining" content-type="ccbyncsalicense">
            https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/</ali:license_ref>
          <license-p>This is an open access journal, and articles are distributed under the terms of
            the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 License, which allows
            others to remix, tweak, and build upon the work non-commercially, as long as appropriate
            credit is given and the new creations are licensed under the identical terms.</license-p>
        </license>
      </permissions>
      <abstract>
        <title>A<sc>BSTRACT</sc></title>
        <p>Drug repurposing can accelerate the transition from biological hypothesis to therapeutic evaluation by leveraging compounds with existing pharmacological knowledge; however, many computational predictions remain challenging to act upon because their underlying biological rationale is not explicit. Current repurposing models often treat drug–disease associations as black-box predictions, limiting their utility for biologists and clinicians who need to understand the pathways, targets, or transcriptomic relationships supporting a proposed indication. To address this, an explainable machine learning model can be designed to predict drug repurposing opportunities while providing transparent biological explanations for each prediction, highlighting influential transcriptomic signatures, pathway signals, and target proteins. Such a multi-modal model could integrate disease expression profiles, drug perturbation signatures, pathway enrichment features, and protein–protein interaction network proximity, with SHAP-based attribution and pathway-level attention decomposing predictions into interpretable biological components. Conceptually, the system would output a ranked set of drug–disease pairs alongside evidence narratives that specify the relevant pathways, target proteins, and directions of transcriptomic reversal, rendering each prediction biologically plausible. By providing interpretable insights, an explainable repurposing model would transform computational repositioning from a mere screening exercise into a hypothesis-generation framework, enabling scientists to prioritize predictions for experimental or translational follow-up.</p>
      </abstract>
      <kwd-group>
                <kwd>Explainable AI</kwd>
                <kwd>Drug repurposing</kwd>
                <kwd>Transcriptomics</kwd>
                <kwd>Drug signatures</kwd>
                <kwd>Pathway enrichment</kwd>
                <kwd>Target networks</kwd>
              </kwd-group>
    </article-meta>
  </front>
</article>