<!DOCTYPE article PUBLIC "-//NLM//DTD JATS (Z39.96) Journal Archiving and Interchange DTD with MathML3 v1.3 20210610//EN" "JATS-archivearticle1-3-mathml3.dtd"><article xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"
  dtd-version="1.3" xml:lang="en" article-type="research-article">
  <?DTDIdentifier.IdentifierValue -//NLM//DTD JATS (Z39.96) Journal Publishing DTD v1.2 20190208//EN?>
  <?DTDIdentifier.IdentifierType public?>
  <?SourceDTD.DTDName JATS-journalpublishing1.dtd?>
  <?SourceDTD.Version 1.2?>
  <?ConverterInfo.XSLTName jats2jats3.xsl?>
  <?ConverterInfo.Version 1?>
  <?properties open_access?>
  <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-6892</article-id>
      <article-id pub-id-type="doi">10.51847/BP9qbtx7Wl</article-id>
      <article-categories>
        <subj-group subj-group-type="heading">
          <subject>Original research</subject>
        </subj-group>
      </article-categories>
      <title-group>
        <article-title>Hierarchical Neural Networks for Drug Response Prediction Using Targets, Transcriptomics, and Pharmacogenomic Biomarkers</article-title>
      </title-group>
                    <contrib-group>
                      <contrib contrib-type="author">
              <name>
                <surname>Al-Zahra</surname>
                <given-names>Fatima</given-names>
              </name>
                              <xref rid="aff1" ref-type="aff">1</xref>
                                                            <xref rid="cor1" ref-type="corresp" />
                          </contrib>
                      <contrib contrib-type="author">
              <name>
                <surname>El Idrissi</surname>
                <given-names>Amina</given-names>
              </name>
                              <xref rid="aff1" ref-type="aff">1</xref>
                                        </contrib>
                  </contrib-group>
                  <aff id="aff1">
            <label>1</label>Department of AI Pharmaceutical Systems, Faculty of Medicine and Pharmacy, University of Casablanca, Casablanca, Morocco.
          </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="fatima.zahra@gmail.com">fatima.zahra@gmail.com</email>
                          </corresp>
          </author-notes>
                    <pub-date pub-type="epub">
        <day>28</day>
        <month>04</month>
        <year>2026</year>
      </pub-date>
      <volume>17</volume>
      <issue>2</issue>
      <fpage>63</fpage>
      <lpage>72</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>Precision oncology seeks to tailor anticancer therapies to individual patients by leveraging molecular profiles of tumors and, when available, patient-specific data; however, predictive models trained on large pharmacogenomic screens often struggle to translate clear in vitro associations into clinically meaningful response predictions. Many existing drug response models combine drug descriptors, gene expression levels, mutations, and copy-number alterations into a single flat representation, disregarding the biological sequence in which a drug engages molecular targets, perturbs cellular programs, and is influenced by the patient’s genomic context. To address this, this MDL article proposes a hierarchical neural network for predicting drug response in cancer, designed to integrate drug-target interactions, tumor transcriptomes, and pharmacogenomic biomarkers within a biologically ordered framework. The architecture first encodes drug-target and target-inhibition information in a lower-level target-engagement module, then merges this latent drug mechanism representation with transcriptomic context in a middle module, and finally modulates the resulting signal using mutation and copy-number biomarkers in an upper pharmacogenomic module to produce a personalized sensitivity estimate. Conceptually, this nested structure is expected to yield more biologically coherent predictions than flat multimodal approaches and could clarify whether predicted resistance arises primarily from inadequate target engagement, an unfavorable transcriptomic state, or genomic alterations affecting drug response. By respecting the hierarchy from drug mechanism to cellular state to patient genotype, such a biologically structured deep learning model offers a principled framework for interpretable precision oncology, potentially bridging preclinical pharmacogenomic screening and clinical decision support.</p>
      </abstract>
      <kwd-group>
                <kwd>Hierarchical neural network</kwd>
                <kwd>Drug response prediction</kwd>
                <kwd>Precision oncology</kwd>
                <kwd>Pharmacogenomics</kwd>
                <kwd>Transcriptomics</kwd>
                <kwd>Multimodal deep learning</kwd>
              </kwd-group>
    </article-meta>
  </front>
</article>