BioMedKG: Multimodal Contrastive Representation Learning in Augmented BioMedical Knowledge Graphs

Tien Dang¹Viet Thanh Duy Nguyen¹Minh Tuan Le²Truong-Son Hy^1*

• ¹The University of Alabama at Birmingham, Birmingham, United States
• ²Washington University in St Louis, St. Louis, United States

ABSTRACT Biomedical Knowledge Graphs (BKGs) integrate diverse datasets to elucidate complex relationships within the biomedical field. Effective link prediction on these graphs can uncover valuable connections, such as potential new drug-disease relations. We introduce a novel multimodal approach that unifies embeddings from specialized Language Models (LMs) with Graph Contrastive Learning (GCL) to enhance intra-entity relationships while employing a Knowledge Graph Embedding (KGE) model to capture inter-entity relationships for effective link prediction. To address limitations in existing BKGs, we present PrimeKG++, an enriched knowledge graph incorporating multimodal data, including biological sequences and textual descriptions for each entity type. By combining semantic and relational information in a unified representation, our approach demonstrates strong generalizability, enabling accurate link predictions even for unseen nodes. Experimental results in PrimeKG++ and the DrugBank drug-target interaction dataset demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of our method in diverse biomedical datasets. Our source code, pre-trained models, and data are publicly available at https://github.com/HySonLab/BioMedKG.