From Knowledge to Treatment: Large Language Model Assisted Biomedical Concept Representation for Drug Repurposing

Chengrui Xiang, Tengfei Ma, Xiangzheng Fu, Yiping Liu, Bosheng Song, Xiangxiang Zeng


Abstract
Drug repurposing plays a critical role in accelerating treatment discovery, especially for complex and rare diseases. Biomedical knowledge graphs (KGs), which encode rich clinical associations, have been widely adopted to support this task. However, existing methods largely overlook common-sense biomedical concept knowledge in real-world labs, such as mechanistic priors indicating that certain drugs are fundamentally incompatible with specific treatments. To address this gap, we propose LLaDR, a Large Language Model-assisted framework for Drug Repurposing, which improves the representation of biomedical concepts within KGs. Specifically, we extract semantically enriched treatment-related textual representations of biomedical entities from large language models (LLMs) and use them to fine-tune knowledge graph embedding (KGE) models. By injecting treatment-relevant knowledge into KGE, LLaDR largely improves the representation of biomedical concepts, enhancing semantic understanding of under-studied or complex indications. Experiments based on benchmarks demonstrate that LLaDR achieves state-of-the-art performance across different scenarios, with case studies on Alzheimer’s disease further confirming its robustness and effectiveness.
Anthology ID:
2025.findings-emnlp.751
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025
Month:
November
Year:
2025
Address:
Suzhou, China
Editors:
Christos Christodoulopoulos, Tanmoy Chakraborty, Carolyn Rose, Violet Peng
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
13967–13982
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2025.findings-emnlp.751/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Chengrui Xiang, Tengfei Ma, Xiangzheng Fu, Yiping Liu, Bosheng Song, and Xiangxiang Zeng. 2025. From Knowledge to Treatment: Large Language Model Assisted Biomedical Concept Representation for Drug Repurposing. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025, pages 13967–13982, Suzhou, China. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
From Knowledge to Treatment: Large Language Model Assisted Biomedical Concept Representation for Drug Repurposing (Xiang et al., Findings 2025)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2025.findings-emnlp.751.pdf
Checklist:
 2025.findings-emnlp.751.checklist.pdf