Motivation: Prediction of the interaction affinity between proteins and compounds is a major challenge in the drug discovery process. WideDTA is a deep-learning based prediction model that employs chemical and biological textual sequence information to predict binding affinity.
Results: WideDTA uses four text-based information sources, namely the protein sequence, ligand SMILES, protein domains and motifs, and maximum common substructure words to predict binding affinity. WideDTA outperformed one of the state of the art deep learning methods for drug-target binding affinity prediction, DeepDTA on the KIBA dataset with a statistical significance. This indicates that the word-based sequence representation adapted by WideDTA is a promising alternative to the character-based sequence representation approach in deep learning models for binding affinity prediction, such as the one used in DeepDTA. In addition, the results showed that, given the protein sequence and ligand SMILES, the inclusion of protein domain and motif information as well as ligand maximum common substructure words do not provide additional useful information for the deep learning model. Interestingly, however, using only domain and motif information to represent proteins achieved similar performance to using the full protein sequence, suggesting that important binding relevant information is contained within the protein motifs and domains.
Department of Computer Engineering, Bogazici University（博加兹奇大学计算机工程系）；Department of Chemical Engineering, Bogazici University（博加兹奇大学化学工程系）
The identification of novel drug-target (DT) interactions is a substantial part of the drug discovery process. Most of the computational methods that have been proposed to predict DT interactions have focused on binary classification, where the goal is to determine whether a DT pair interacts or not. However, protein-ligand interactions assume a continuum of binding strength values, also called binding affinity and predicting this value still remains a challenge. The increase in the affinity data available in DT knowledge-bases allows the use of advanced learning techniques such as deep learni…
The first step in drug discovery is finding drug molecule moieties with medicinal activity against specific targets. Therefore, it is crucial to investigate the interaction between drug-target proteins and small chemical molecules. However, traditional experimental methods for discovering potential small drug molecules are labor-intensive and time-consuming. There is currently a lot of interest in building computational models to screen small drug molecules using drug molecule-related databases. In this paper, we propose a method for predicting drug-target binding affinity using deep learning …
Identification of high affinity drug-target interactions is a major research question in drug discovery. Proteins are generally represented by their structures or sequences. However, structures are available only for a small subset of biomolecules and sequence similarity is not always correlated with functional similarity. We propose ChemBoost, a chemical language based approach for affinity prediction using SMILES syntax. We hypothesize that SMILES is a codified language and ligands are documents composed of chemical words. These documents can be used to learn chemical word vectors that repre…
Computational models that accurately predict the binding affinity of an input protein-chemical pair can accelerate drug discovery studies. These models are trained on available protein-chemical interaction datasets, which may contain dataset biases that may lead the model to learn dataset-specific patterns, instead of generalizable relationships. As a result, the prediction performance of models drops for previously unseen biomolecules, $\textit{i.e.}$ the prediction models cannot generalize to biomolecules outside of the dataset. The latest approaches that aim to improve model generalizabilit…
Assessing drug-target affinity is a critical step in the drug discovery and development process, but to obtain such data experimentally is both time consuming and expensive. For this reason, computational methods for predicting binding strength are being widely developed. However, these methods typically use a single-task approach for prediction, thus ignoring the additional information that can be extracted from the data and used to drive the learning process. Thereafter in this work, we present a multi-task approach for binding strength prediction. Our results suggest that these prediction c…
HiF-DTA: Hierarchical Feature Learning Network for Drug-Target Affinity Prediction
School of Software Engineering Huazhong University of Science（软件工程学院 华中科技大学）；Faculty of Data Science City University of Macau Macau, China（数据科学学院 澳门城市大学）；Union Hospital, Tongji Medical College Huazhong University of Science（同济医学院附属医院 华中科技大学）
Compound-protein pairs dominate FDA-approved drug-target pairs and the prediction of compound-protein affinity and contact (CPAC) could help accelerate drug discovery. In this study we consider proteins as multi-modal data including 1D amino-acid sequences and (sequence-predicted) 2D residue-pair contact maps. We empirically evaluate the embeddings of the two single modalities in their accuracy and generalizability of CPAC prediction (i.e. structure-free interpretable compound-protein affinity prediction). And we rationalize their performances in both challenges of embedding individual modalit…
Drug targets are the main focus of drug discovery due to their key role in disease pathogenesis. Computational approaches are widely applied to drug development because of the increasing availability of biological molecular datasets. Popular generative approaches can create new drug molecules by learning the given molecule distributions. However, these approaches are mostly not for target-specific drug discovery. We developed an energy-based probabilistic model for computational target-specific drug discovery. Results show that our proposed TagMol can generate molecules with similar binding af…
Exploiting Pre-trained Models for Drug Target Affinity Prediction with Nearest Neighbors
Gaoling School of AI (GSAI), Renmin University of China（中国人民大学高瓴人工智能学院（GSAI））；Microsoft Research（微软研究院）；School of Intelligence Science and Technology, Peking University（北京大学智能科学与技术学院）；University of Science and Technology of China（中国科学技术大学）；Engineering Research Center of Next-Generation Intelligent Search and Recommendation, Ministry of Education（教育部下一代智能搜索与推荐工程研究中心）
SOC-DGL: Social Interaction Behavior Inspired Dual Graph Learning Framework for Drug-Target Interaction Identification
College of Marine Electrical Engineering, Dalian Maritime University（大连海事大学海洋电气工程学院）；AI thrust, Information Hub, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (GuangZhou)（香港科技大学（广州）人工智能方向、信息中心）；School of Artificial Intelligence and Computer Science, Jiangnan University（江南大学人工智能与计算机科学学院）；Department of Information Science and Technology, Dalian Maritime University（大连海事大学信息科学与技术学院）
Stanford University（斯坦福大学）；Stanford University School of Medicine（斯坦福大学医学院）
Empirical scoring functions based on either molecular force fields or cheminformatics descriptors are widely used, in conjunction with molecular docking, during the early stages of drug discovery to predict potency and binding affinity of a drug-like molecule to a given target. These models require expert-level knowledge of physical chemistry and biology to be encoded as hand-tuned parameters or features rather than allowing the underlying model to select features in a data-driven procedure. Here, we develop a general 3-dimensional spatial convolution operation for learning atomic-level chemic…
Instituto de Ciencias Matemáticas (ICMAT)（数学科学研究所（ICMAT））；Universidad Autónoma de Madrid（马德里自治大学）；Universidad Politécnica de Madrid（马德里理工大学）；Ingenii Inc.（Ingenii公司）
One of the main challenges in drug discovery is to find molecules that bind specifically and strongly to their target protein while having minimal binding to other proteins. By predicting binding affinity, it is possible to identify the most promising candidates from a large pool of potential compounds, reducing the number of compounds that need to be tested experimentally. Recently, deep learning methods have shown superior performance than traditional computational methods for making accurate predictions on large datasets. However, the complexity and time-consuming nature of these methods ha…
From Static to Dynamic Structures: Improving Binding Affinity Prediction with Graph-Based Deep Learning
Institute for Interdisciplinary Information Sciences, Tsinghua University（清华大学交叉信息研究院）；School of Medicine, Tsinghua University（清华大学医学院）；KTH Stockholm（瑞典皇家理工学院）；Microsoft Research Asia（微软亚洲研究院）；School of Life Science and Technology, Xidian University（西安电子科技大学生命科学技术学院）；School of Engineering, Westlake University（西湖大学工程学院）
Latent Chemical Space Searching for Plug-in Multi-objective Molecule Generation
State Key Laboratory of Natural and Biomimetic Drugs, School of Pharmaceutical Sciences, Peking University（北京大学药学院天然药物及仿生药物国家重点实验室）；State Key Laboratory of Pharmaceutical Biotechnology, Nanjing University（南京大学医药生物技术国家重点实验室）
MSCoD: An Enhanced Bayesian Updating Framework with Multi-Scale Information Bottleneck and Cooperative Attention for Structure-Based Drug Design
Guangxi Key Lab of Human-machine Interaction and Intelligent Decision（广西人机交互与智能决策重点实验室）；Nanning Normal University（南宁师范学院）；College of Big Data and Software Engineering（大数据与软件工程学院）；Zhejiang Wanli University（浙江万里大学）
D. E. Shaw Research（D.E.肖研究所）；Columbia University（哥伦比亚大学）
Drug discovery projects entail cycles of design, synthesis, and testing that yield a series of chemically related small molecules whose properties, such as binding affinity to a given target protein, are progressively tailored to a particular drug discovery goal. The use of deep learning technologies could augment the typical practice of using human intuition in the design cycle, and thereby expedite drug discovery projects. Here we present DESMILES, a deep neural network model that advances the state of the art in machine learning approaches to molecular design. We applied DESMILES to a previ…
Institute of Biochemistry and Biophysics, Polish Academy of Sciences（波兰科学院生物化学与生物物理研究所）；University of Warsaw（华沙大学）
Structure based ligand discovery is one of the most successful approaches for augmenting the drug discovery process. Currently, there is a notable shift towards machine learning (ML) methodologies to aid such procedures. Deep learning has recently gained considerable attention as it allows the model to "learn" to extract features that are relevant for the task at hand. We have developed a novel deep neural network estimating the binding affinity of ligand-receptor complexes. The complex is represented with a 3D grid, and the model utilizes a 3D convolution to produce a feature map of this repr…
Eindhoven University of Technology（埃因霍温理工大学）；Microsoft Research Cambridge（微软剑桥研究院）；Centre for Living Technologies（生命技术中心）
Artificial intelligence (AI) in the form of deep learning bears promise for drug discovery and chemical biology, $\textit{e.g.}$, to predict protein structure and molecular bioactivity, plan organic synthesis, and design molecules $\textit{de novo}$. While most of the deep learning efforts in drug discovery have focused on ligand-based approaches, structure-based drug discovery has the potential to tackle unsolved challenges, such as affinity prediction for unexplored protein targets, binding-mechanism elucidation, and the rationalization of related chemical kinetic properties. Advances in dee…
Computational drug discovery strategies can be broadly placed in two categories: ligand-based methods which identify novel molecules by similarity with known ligands, and structure-based methods which predict molecules with high-affinity to a given 3D structure (e.g. a protein). However, ligand-based methods do not leverage information about the binding site, and structure-based approaches rely on the knowledge of a finite set of ligands binding the target. In this work, we introduce TarLig, a novel approach that aims to bridge the gap between ligand and structure-based approaches. We use the …
While generative models have recently become ubiquitous in many scientific areas, less attention has been paid to their evaluation. For molecular generative models, the state-of-the-art examines their output in isolation or in relation to its input. However, their biological and functional properties, such as ligand-target interaction is not being addressed. In this study, a novel biologically-inspired benchmark for the evaluation of molecular generative models is proposed. Specifically, three diverse reference datasets are designed and a set of metrics are introduced which are directly releva…
Indian Association for the Cultivation of Science（印度科学培育协会）
Development of new drugs is an expensive and time-consuming process. Due to the world-wide SARS-CoV-2 outbreak, it is essential that new drugs for SARS-CoV-2 are developed as soon as possible. Drug repurposing techniques can reduce the time span needed to develop new drugs by probing the list of existing FDA-approved drugs and their properties to reuse them for combating the new disease. We propose a novel architecture DeepGLSTM, which is a Graph Convolutional network and LSTM based method that predicts binding affinity values between the FDA-approved drugs and the viral proteins of SARS-CoV-2…
Delta Score: Improving the Binding Assessment of Structure-Based Drug Design Methods
Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院自动化研究所）；Institute for AI Industry Research (AIR), Tsinghua University（清华大学人工智能产业研究院）；Peking University（北京大学）
In de novo drug design, computational strategies are used to generate novel molecules with good affinity to the desired biological target. In this work, we show that recurrent neural networks can be trained as generative models for molecular structures, similar to statistical language models in natural language processing. We demonstrate that the properties of the generated molecules correlate very well with the properties of the molecules used to train the model. In order to enrich libraries with molecules active towards a given biological target, we propose to fine-tune the model with small …
Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology（孟加拉国工程技术大学）
The discovery of novel drug target (DT) interactions is an important step in the drug development process. The majority of computer techniques for predicting DT interactions have focused on binary classification, with the goal of determining whether or not a DT pair interacts. Protein ligand interactions, on the other hand, assume a continuous range of binding strength values, also known as binding affinity, and forecasting this value remains a difficulty. As the amount of affinity data in DT knowledge-bases grows, advanced learning techniques such as deep learning architectures can be used to…
KAIST（韩国科学技术院）；HITS incorporation（HITS 公司）；KI for Artificial Intelligence, KAIST（韩国科学技术院人工智能研究院）
Recently, deep neural network (DNN)-based drug-target interaction (DTI) models were highlighted for their high accuracy with affordable computational costs. Yet, the models' insufficient generalization remains a challenging problem in the practice of in-silico drug discovery. We propose two key strategies to enhance generalization in the DTI model. The first is to predict the atom-atom pairwise interactions via physics-informed equations parameterized with neural networks and provides the total binding affinity of a protein-ligand complex as their sum. We further improved the model generalizat…
The work for predicting drug and target affinity(DTA) is crucial for drug development and repurposing. In this work, we propose a novel method called GDGRU-DTA to predict the binding affinity between drugs and targets, which is based on GraphDTA, but we consider that protein sequences are long sequences, so simple CNN cannot capture the context dependencies in protein sequences well. Therefore, we improve it by interpreting the protein sequences as time series and extracting their features using Gate Recurrent Unit(GRU) and Bidirectional Gate Recurrent Unit(BiGRU). For the drug, our processing…
Baidu Inc.（百度公司）；University of Science and Technology of China（中国科学技术大学）；Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey（罗格斯大学（新泽西州立大学））
Accurately predicting the binding affinity between drugs and proteins is an essential step for computational drug discovery. Since graph neural networks (GNNs) have demonstrated remarkable success in various graph-related tasks, GNNs have been considered as a promising tool to improve the binding affinity prediction in recent years. However, most of the existing GNN architectures can only encode the topological graph structure of drugs and proteins without considering the relative spatial information among their atoms. Whereas, different from other graph datasets such as social networks and co…
University of Science and Technology of China（中国科学技术大学）；Microsoft Research（微软研究院）；Renmin University of China（中国人民大学）
Structure-based drug design is drawing growing attentions in computer-aided drug discovery. Compared with the virtual screening approach where a pre-defined library of compounds are computationally screened, de novo drug design based on the structure of a target protein can provide novel drug candidates. In this paper, we present a generative solution named TamGent (Target-aware molecule generator with Transformer) that can directly generate candidate drugs from scratch for a given target, overcoming the limits imposed by existing compound libraries. Following the Transformer framework (a stat…
KEPLA: A Knowledge-Enhanced Deep Learning Framework for Accurate Protein-Ligand Binding Affinity Prediction
Department of Computer Science, City University of Hong Kong（香港城市大学计算机科学系）；ZJU-Hangzhou Global Scientific and Technological Innovation Center, Zhejiang University（浙江大学杭州国际科技创新中心）；School of Software, Shandong University（山东大学软件学院）；College of Informatics, Harbin Institute of Technology (Shenzhen)（哈尔滨工业大学（深圳）计算机学院）
DrugGen 2: A disease-aware language model for enhancing drug discovery
Regenerative Medicine Research Center（再生医学研究中心）；Isfahan University of Medical Sciences（伊斯法罕医科大学）；Isfahan Neuroscience Research Center（伊斯法罕神经科学研究中心）；School of Pharmacy（药学院）；Department of Medicinal Chemistry（药理化学系）；Cardiovascular Research Institute（心血管研究学院）；Department of Genetics and Molecular Biology（基因与分子生物学系）；Bioinformatics Research Center（生物信息学研究中心）
Global Health Drug Discovery Institute（全球健康药物研发中心）
Antibody therapeutics has been extensively studied in drug discovery and development within the past decades. One increasingly popular focus in the antibody discovery pipeline is the optimization step for therapeutic leads. Both traditional methods and in silico approaches aim to generate candidates with high binding affinity against specific target antigens. Traditional in vitro approaches use hybridoma or phage display for candidate selection, and surface plasmon resonance (SPR) for evaluation, while in silico computational approaches aim to reduce the high cost and improve efficiency by inc…
REINFORCE-ING Chemical Language Models for Drug Discovery
Computational Science Laboratory, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona Biomedical Research Park (PRBB), C Dr. Aiguader 88, 08003 Barcelona, Spain；In Silico Discovery, Janssen Research \& Development, Janssen Pharmaceutica N. V., Turnhoutseweg 30, B-2340 Beerse, Belgium
College of Computer Science and Technology, Hunan University（湖南大学信息科学与工程学院）
Accurately predicting drug-target binding affinity (DTA) in silico is a key task in drug discovery. Most of the conventional DTA prediction methods are simulation-based, which rely heavily on domain knowledge or the assumption of having the 3D structure of the targets, which are often difficult to obtain. Meanwhile, traditional machine learning-based methods apply various features and descriptors, and simply depend on the similarities between drug-target pairs. Recently, with the increasing amount of affinity data available and the success of deep representation learning models on various doma…
Machine learning shows great potential in virtual screening for drug discovery. Current efforts on accelerating docking-based virtual screening do not consider using existing data of other previously developed targets. To make use of the knowledge of the other targets and take advantage of the existing data, in this work, we apply multi-task learning to the problem of docking-based virtual screening. With two large docking datasets, the results of extensive experiments show that multi-task learning can achieve better performances on docking score prediction. By learning knowledge across multip…
Institute of Biochemistry and Biophysics, Polish Academy of Sciences（波兰科学院生物化学与生物物理研究所）；University of Warsaw（华沙大学）
In recent years machine learning (ML) took bio- and cheminformatics fields by storm, providing new solutions for a vast repertoire of problems related to protein sequence, structure, and interactions analysis. ML techniques, deep neural networks especially, were proven more effective than classical models for tasks like predicting binding affinity for molecular complex. In this work we investigated the earlier stage of drug discovery process - finding druggable pockets on protein surface, that can be later used to design active molecules. For this purpose we developed a 3D fully convolutional …
Tencent AI Lab（腾讯人工智能实验室）；The University of Hong Kong（香港大学）；Fudan University（复旦大学）
AI-aided drug discovery (AIDD) is gaining increasing popularity due to its promise of making the search for new pharmaceuticals quicker, cheaper and more efficient. In spite of its extensive use in many fields, such as ADMET prediction, virtual screening, protein folding and generative chemistry, little has been explored in terms of the out-of-distribution (OOD) learning problem with \emph{noise}, which is inevitable in real world AIDD applications. In this work, we present DrugOOD, a systematic OOD dataset curator and benchmark for AI-aided drug discovery, which comes with an open-source Pyth…
Pennsylvania State University（宾夕法尼亚州立大学）；IBM（国际商业机器公司）
Existing drug discovery pipelines take 5-10 years and cost billions of dollars. Computational approaches aim to sample from regions of the whole molecular and solid-state compounds called chemical space which could be on the order of 1060 . Deep generative models can model the underlying probability distribution of both the physical structures and property of drugs and relate them nonlinearly. By exploiting patterns in massive datasets, these models can distill salient features that characterize the molecules. Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) discover drug candidates by generating molecu…
IBM Research（IBM研究院）；MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab（MIT-IBM沃森人工智能实验室）；IBM Research Europe（IBM欧洲研究院）
The novel nature of SARS-CoV-2 calls for the development of efficient de novo drug design approaches. In this study, we propose an end-to-end framework, named CogMol (Controlled Generation of Molecules), for designing new drug-like small molecules targeting novel viral proteins with high affinity and off-target selectivity. CogMol combines adaptive pre-training of a molecular SMILES Variational Autoencoder (VAE) and an efficient multi-attribute controlled sampling scheme that uses guidance from attribute predictors trained on latent features. To generate novel and optimal drug-like molecules f…
Drug resistance is a major threat to the global health and a significant concern throughout the clinical treatment of diseases and drug development. The mutation in proteins that is related to drug binding is a common cause for adaptive drug resistance. Therefore, quantitative estimations of how mutations would affect the interaction between a drug and the target protein would be of vital significance for the drug development and the clinical practice. Computational methods that rely on molecular dynamics simulations, Rosetta protocols, as well as machine learning methods have been proven to b…
