Peer Review History

Original SubmissionJanuary 11, 2022
Decision Letter - Sathishkumar V E, Editor

PONE-D-22-00703A feature transferring workflow between data-poor compounds in various tasksPLOS ONE

Dear Dr. Chen,

Thank you for submitting your manuscript to PLOS ONE. After careful consideration, we feel that it has merit but does not fully meet PLOS ONE’s publication criteria as it currently stands. Therefore, we invite you to submit a revised version of the manuscript that addresses the points raised during the review process.

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We look forward to receiving your revised manuscript.

Kind regards,

Sathishkumar V E

Academic Editor

PLOS ONE

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2. Please review your reference list to ensure that it is complete and correct. If you have cited papers that have been retracted, please include the rationale for doing so in the manuscript text, or remove these references and replace them with relevant current references. Any changes to the reference list should be mentioned in the rebuttal letter that accompanies your revised manuscript. If you need to cite a retracted article, indicate the article’s retracted status in the References list and also include a citation and full reference for the retraction notice.

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"This work is partially supported by Shenzhen Science and Technology Research Fund (JCYJ20190806142203709; JSGG20191129114029286; JSGG20201103153807021), the Talent Development Starting Fund from Shenzhen Government (HA11409030)."

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Please include your amended Funding Statement within your cover letter. We will change the online submission form on your behalf.

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"This work is partially supported by Shenzhen Science and Technology Research Fund (JCYJ20190806142203709; JSGG20191129114029286; JSGG20201103153807021), the Talent Development Starting Fund from Shenzhen Government (HA11409030)."

   

We note that one or more of the authors are employed by a commercial company: Chengdu Information Technology of Chinese Academy of Sciences Co Ltd 

a. Please provide an amended Funding Statement declaring this commercial affiliation, as well as a statement regarding the Role of Funders in your study. If the funding organization did not play a role in the study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript and only provided financial support in the form of authors' salaries and/or research materials, please review your statements relating to the author contributions, and ensure you have specifically and accurately indicated the role(s) that these authors had in your study. You can update author roles in the Author Contributions section of the online submission form.

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[Note: HTML markup is below. Please do not edit.]

Reviewers' comments:

Reviewer's Responses to Questions

Comments to the Author

1. Is the manuscript technically sound, and do the data support the conclusions?

The manuscript must describe a technically sound piece of scientific research with data that supports the conclusions. Experiments must have been conducted rigorously, with appropriate controls, replication, and sample sizes. The conclusions must be drawn appropriately based on the data presented.

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

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2. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously?

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: No

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3. Have the authors made all data underlying the findings in their manuscript fully available?

The PLOS Data policy requires authors to make all data underlying the findings described in their manuscript fully available without restriction, with rare exception (please refer to the Data Availability Statement in the manuscript PDF file). The data should be provided as part of the manuscript or its supporting information, or deposited to a public repository. For example, in addition to summary statistics, the data points behind means, medians and variance measures should be available. If there are restrictions on publicly sharing data—e.g. participant privacy or use of data from a third party—those must be specified.

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

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4. Is the manuscript presented in an intelligible fashion and written in standard English?

PLOS ONE does not copyedit accepted manuscripts, so the language in submitted articles must be clear, correct, and unambiguous. Any typographical or grammatical errors should be corrected at revision, so please note any specific errors here.

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

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5. Review Comments to the Author

Please use the space provided to explain your answers to the questions above. You may also include additional comments for the author, including concerns about dual publication, research ethics, or publication ethics. (Please upload your review as an attachment if it exceeds 20,000 characters)

Reviewer #1: In the results required comparison table for exiting terms and proposed idea with all the parameters.

The Abstract is clear and implementation, conclusion meet the requirement.

The manuscript has been written in standard English.

Reviewer #2: The authors have developed drug activity and toxicity prediction based on Siamese networks and graph convolution to produce multitasking output for understudied targets to overcome the scarcity of drug data. The problem solved in the article is significant and relevant to the venue. The scientific novelty and contributions of this paper are good enough for publication. However, I have a few suggestions worth including to represent the article better.

Positive aspects of the paper:

This paper is well motivated and easy to follow.

Experiments are well designed, and the proposed algorithm works well compared to baseline algorithms.

Suggestion/comments:

The authors should highlight the novelty and motivation of their proposed method.

Further, they should highlight the challenges or limitations of the proposed work.

I suggest adding some statistical analysis tests to validate the results.

The paper needs proofreading to eliminate any typos errors, for example, on page 2, line 21.

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Reviewer #1: Yes: Anandhan K

Reviewer #2: No

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Revision 1

Dear academic editor and reviewers,

I am very appreciated for your comments and suggestions. I have revised this manuscript and especially paid much attention to your comments and suggestions. The details of the revision are as follows:

Replies to the academic editor:

1. The style of the manuscript has been modified in the latex file to comply with the requirements of the template.

2. The completeness and style of the reference list have been reviewed, and the retracted articles are not cited.

3. The statement “There was no additional external funding received for this study.” has been included in our updated Funding Statement.

4.“The funder provided support in the form of salaries for authors [XS, JZ, BC, HY and HX], but did not have any additional role in the study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript. The specific roles of these authors are articulated in the ‘author contributions’ section.” has been included in our updated Funding Statement.

5. "This does not alter our adherence to PLOS ONE policies on sharing data and materials.” has been included within our Competing Interests Statement.

6. An updated Funding Statement and Competing Interests Statement have been included in our cover letter.

Replies to Reviewer #1:

1. The comparison tables (Tables 1 and 2) for exiting terms and proposed idea with all the parameters has been added in the results.

Replies to Reviewer #2:

1. The novelty and motivation of the proposed method have been highlighted in the abstract as: Owing to an overall insufficiency and imbalance of drug data, it is hard to accurately predict drug activity and toxicity of multiple tasks by the existing models. To solve this problem, this paper proposed a two-stage transfer learning workflow to develop a novel prediction model, which can accurately predict drug activity and toxicity of the targets with insufficient observations.

2. The challenges and limitations of the proposed work have been highlighted in the conclusion as: In order to make the model proposed in this paper can be used in common situation, it is essential to establish massive multi-task datasets for pretraining, which is also an interesting attempt for our future research work.

3. Some statistical analysis tests, as illustrated in Figures 9, 10 and 11, have been added to validate the results.

4. The manuscript has been proofread to eliminate typos errors. For example, line 21 on page 2 has been revised to read: For example, due to the difficulty of obtaining tumor tissue fragments of bone metastasis, the scarcity of sarcomatous-type tumors, and the difficulty in culturing bone tissue into cell lines, the number of cell models is insufficient.

We thank you in advance for considering our manuscript for publication in PLOS ONE.

Sincerely,

Xiaofei Sun

Attachments
Attachment
Submitted filename: Response to Reviewers.docx
Decision Letter - Sathishkumar V E, Editor

A feature transferring workflow between data-poor compounds in various tasks

PONE-D-22-00703R1

Dear Dr. Chen,

We’re pleased to inform you that your manuscript has been judged scientifically suitable for publication and will be formally accepted for publication once it meets all outstanding technical requirements.

Within one week, you’ll receive an e-mail detailing the required amendments. When these have been addressed, you’ll receive a formal acceptance letter and your manuscript will be scheduled for publication.

An invoice for payment will follow shortly after the formal acceptance. To ensure an efficient process, please log into Editorial Manager at http://www.editorialmanager.com/pone/, click the 'Update My Information' link at the top of the page, and double check that your user information is up-to-date. If you have any billing related questions, please contact our Author Billing department directly at authorbilling@plos.org.

If your institution or institutions have a press office, please notify them about your upcoming paper to help maximize its impact. If they’ll be preparing press materials, please inform our press team as soon as possible -- no later than 48 hours after receiving the formal acceptance. Your manuscript will remain under strict press embargo until 2 pm Eastern Time on the date of publication. For more information, please contact onepress@plos.org.

Kind regards,

Sathishkumar V E

Academic Editor

PLOS ONE

Additional Editor Comments (optional):

Reviewers' comments:

Reviewer's Responses to Questions

Comments to the Author

1. If the authors have adequately addressed your comments raised in a previous round of review and you feel that this manuscript is now acceptable for publication, you may indicate that here to bypass the “Comments to the Author” section, enter your conflict of interest statement in the “Confidential to Editor” section, and submit your "Accept" recommendation.

Reviewer #1: All comments have been addressed

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2. Is the manuscript technically sound, and do the data support the conclusions?

The manuscript must describe a technically sound piece of scientific research with data that supports the conclusions. Experiments must have been conducted rigorously, with appropriate controls, replication, and sample sizes. The conclusions must be drawn appropriately based on the data presented.

Reviewer #1: Yes

**********

3. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously?

Reviewer #1: Yes

**********

4. Have the authors made all data underlying the findings in their manuscript fully available?

The PLOS Data policy requires authors to make all data underlying the findings described in their manuscript fully available without restriction, with rare exception (please refer to the Data Availability Statement in the manuscript PDF file). The data should be provided as part of the manuscript or its supporting information, or deposited to a public repository. For example, in addition to summary statistics, the data points behind means, medians and variance measures should be available. If there are restrictions on publicly sharing data—e.g. participant privacy or use of data from a third party—those must be specified.

Reviewer #1: Yes

**********

5. Is the manuscript presented in an intelligible fashion and written in standard English?

PLOS ONE does not copyedit accepted manuscripts, so the language in submitted articles must be clear, correct, and unambiguous. Any typographical or grammatical errors should be corrected at revision, so please note any specific errors here.

Reviewer #1: Yes

**********

6. Review Comments to the Author

Please use the space provided to explain your answers to the questions above. You may also include additional comments for the author, including concerns about dual publication, research ethics, or publication ethics. (Please upload your review as an attachment if it exceeds 20,000 characters)

Reviewer #1: All the correction has been updated. The reviewer comments are updated in the new version article.

**********

7. PLOS authors have the option to publish the peer review history of their article (what does this mean?). If published, this will include your full peer review and any attached files.

If you choose “no”, your identity will remain anonymous but your review may still be made public.

Do you want your identity to be public for this peer review? For information about this choice, including consent withdrawal, please see our Privacy Policy.

Reviewer #1: Yes: ANANDHAN K

Formally Accepted
Acceptance Letter - Sathishkumar V E, Editor

PONE-D-22-00703R1

A feature transferring workflow between data-poor compounds in various tasks

Dear Dr. Chen:

I'm pleased to inform you that your manuscript has been deemed suitable for publication in PLOS ONE. Congratulations! Your manuscript is now with our production department.

If your institution or institutions have a press office, please let them know about your upcoming paper now to help maximize its impact. If they'll be preparing press materials, please inform our press team within the next 48 hours. Your manuscript will remain under strict press embargo until 2 pm Eastern Time on the date of publication. For more information please contact onepress@plos.org.

If we can help with anything else, please email us at plosone@plos.org.

Thank you for submitting your work to PLOS ONE and supporting open access.

Kind regards,

PLOS ONE Editorial Office Staff

on behalf of

Dr. Sathishkumar V E

Academic Editor

PLOS ONE

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