cs.LGSep 6, 2026

DrugReason: Dynamic Multi-View Reasoning over Knowledge Graph and Language Evidence for Drug Repurposing

Authors: Zijie Liu, Hongxuan Li, Zhen Tan, Jinhao Duan, Baixiang Huang, Zunpeng Liu, Kai Shu, Tianlong Chen

Organizations: University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill · Stevens Institute of Technology · Emory University · Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Abstract

Drug repurposing aims to identify new therapeutic uses for existing compounds and, compared with de novo drug discovery, offers a faster and more cost-effective path to clinical translation. However, the space of candidate drug-disease pairs is enormous and their underlying relationships often depend on complex multi-hop biological mechanisms, making it difficult to reliably predict which pairs represent true therapeutic relationships. Existing approaches tackle this from two directions: knowledge graph-based methods organize curated biomedical evidence into structured relational networks for grounded multi-hop reasoning, while LLM-based methods leverage pretrained knowledge to generate flexible mechanistic rationales. Yet neither is sufficient alone - KGs are confined to observed graph structure while LLMs lack factual grounding and risk hallucination. To address this gap, we propose DrugReason, a multi-view reasoning framework that integrates grounded KG reasoning with LLM-generated mechanistic inference for drug repurposing. DrugReason adaptively routes diverse reasoning paths to specialized experts conditioned on the query context, while a cross-expert distillation objective enables knowledge sharing without sacrificing expert specialization. Experiments on PharmaDB, DDInter, and DrugBank show that DrugReason improves average performance over strong single-view reasoning baselines and achieves competitive or superior results compared with graph-based alternatives, while providing interpretable routing-based predictions.

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