Abstract
The novel coronavirus SARS-CoV-2, which causes Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), is a significant threat to worldwide public health. Viruses such as SARS-CoV-2 infect the human body by forming interactions between virus proteins and human proteins that compromise normal human protein-protein interactions (PPI). Current in vivo methods to identify PPIs between a novel virus and humans are slow, costly, and difficult to cover the vast interaction space. We propose a novel deep learning architecture designed for in silico PPI prediction and a transfer learning approach to predict interactions between novel virus proteins and human proteins. We show that our approach outperforms the state-of-the-art methods significantly in predicting Virus–Human protein interactions for SARS-CoV-2, H1N1, and Ebola.
Competing Interest Statement
The authors have declared no competing interest.