The ultimate goal of drug design is to find novel compounds with desirable pharmacological properties. Designing molecules retaining particular scaffolds as the core structures of the molecules is one of the efficient ways to obtain potential drug candidates with desirable properties. We proposed a scaffold-based molecular generative model for scaffold-based drug discovery, which performs molecule generation based on a wide spectrum of scaffold definitions, including BM-scaffolds, cyclic skeletons, as well as scaffolds with specifications on side-chain properties. The model can generalize the learned chemical rules of adding atoms and bonds to a given scaffold. Furthermore, the generated compounds were evaluated by molecular docking in DRD2 targets and the results demonstrated that this approach can be effectively applied to solve several drug design problems, including the generation of compounds containing a given scaffold and de novo drug design of potential drug candidates with specific docking scores. Finally, a command line interface is created.
In the scope of drug discovery, the molecular design aims to identify novel compounds from the chemical space where the potential drug-like molecules are estimated to be in the order of 10^60 - 10^100. Since this search task is computationally intractable due to the unbounded search space, deep learning draws a lot of attention as a new way of generating unseen molecules. As we seek compounds with specific target proteins, we propose a Transformer-based deep model for de novo target-specific molecular design. The proposed method is capable of generating both drug-like compounds (without specif…
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 …
Novartis Institutes for BioMedical Research（诺华生物医学研究所）
The exploration of novel chemical spaces is one of the most important tasks of cheminformatics when supporting the drug discovery process. Properly designed and trained deep neural networks can provide a viable alternative to brute-force de novo approaches or various other machine-learning techniques for generating novel drug-like molecules. In this article we present a method to generate molecules using a long short-term memory (LSTM) neural network and provide an analysis of the results, including a virtual screening test. Using the network one million drug-like molecules were generated in 2…
The de novo design of molecular structures using deep learning generative models introduces an encouraging solution to drug discovery in the face of the continuously increased cost of new drug development. From the generation of original texts, images, and videos, to the scratching of novel molecular structures, the incredible creativity of deep learning generative models surprised us about the height machine intelligence can achieve. The purpose of this paper is to review the latest advances in generative chemistry which relies on generative modeling to expedite the drug discovery process. Th…
ETH Zurich（苏黎世联邦理工学院）；ETH Singapore SEC Ltd（苏黎世联邦理工新加坡SEC有限公司）
Structure-based drug design uses three-dimensional geometric information of macromolecules, such as proteins or nucleic acids, to identify suitable ligands. Geometric deep learning, an emerging concept of neural-network-based machine learning, has been applied to macromolecular structures. This review provides an overview of the recent applications of geometric deep learning in bioorganic and medicinal chemistry, highlighting its potential for structure-based drug discovery and design. Emphasis is placed on molecular property prediction, ligand binding site and pose prediction, and structure-b…
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…
Recently, deep generative models have revealed itself as a promising way of performing de novo molecule design. However, previous research has focused mainly on generating SMILES strings instead of molecular graphs. Although current graph generative models are available, they are often too general and computationally expensive, which restricts their application to molecules with small sizes. In this work, a new de novo molecular design framework is proposed based on a type sequential graph generators that do not use atom level recurrent units. Compared with previous graph generative models, th…
How Evaluation Choices Distort the Outcome of Generative Drug Discovery
Institute for Complex Molecular Systems（复杂分子系统研究所）；Dept. Biomedical Engineering, Eindhoven University of Technology, Eindhoven, The Netherlands（生物医学工程系，埃因霍温理工大学，埃因霍温，荷兰）；Centre for Living Technologies, Alliance TU/e, WUR, UU, UMC Utrecht, The Netherlands（生命技术中心，联盟TU/e，WUR，UU，乌得勒支大学医疗中心，荷兰）
Searching new molecules in areas like drug discovery often starts from the core structures of candidate molecules to optimize the properties of interest. The way as such has called for a strategy of designing molecules retaining a particular scaffold as a substructure. On this account, our present work proposes a scaffold-based molecular generative model. The model generates molecular graphs by extending the graph of a scaffold through sequential additions of vertices and edges. In contrast to previous related models, our model guarantees the generated molecules to retain the given scaffold wi…
Mila - Quebec AI Institute（米拉-魁北克人工智能研究所）；University of Montreal（蒙特利尔大学）；Peking University（北京大学）；Shanghai Jiao Tong University（上海交通大学）；Tsinghua University（清华大学）
Machine learning has huge potential to revolutionize the field of drug discovery and is attracting increasing attention in recent years. However, lacking domain knowledge (e.g., which tasks to work on), standard benchmarks and data preprocessing pipelines are the main obstacles for machine learning researchers to work in this domain. To facilitate the progress of machine learning for drug discovery, we develop TorchDrug, a powerful and flexible machine learning platform for drug discovery built on top of PyTorch. TorchDrug benchmarks a variety of important tasks in drug discovery, including mo…
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）
Gwangju Institute of Science and Technology（光州科学技术院）
Personalized medicine is expected to maximize the intended drug effects and minimize side effects by treating patients based on their genetic profiles. Thus, it is important to generate drugs based on the genetic profiles of diseases, especially in anticancer drug discovery. However, this is challenging because the vast chemical space and variations in cancer properties require a huge time resource to search for proper molecules. Therefore, an efficient and fast search method considering genetic profiles is required for de novo molecular design of anticancer drugs. Here, we propose a faster mo…
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…
Wildcard Pharmaceutical Consulting（万卡医药咨询公司）；Science Data Software LLC（科学数据软件有限责任公司）
Chemical autoencoders are attractive models as they combine chemical space navigation with possibilities for de-novo molecule generation in areas of interest. This enables them to produce focused chemical libraries around a single lead compound for employment early in a drug discovery project. Here it is shown that the choice of chemical representation, such as SMILES strings, has a large influence on the properties of the latent space. It is further explored to what extent translating between different chemical representations influences the latent space similarity to the SMILES strings or ci…
DrugReason: Dynamic Multi-View Reasoning over Knowledge Graph and Language Evidence for Drug Repurposing
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill（北卡罗来纳大学教堂山分校）；Stevens Institute of Technology（史蒂文斯理工学院）；Emory University（埃默里大学）；Massachusetts Institute of Technology（麻省理工学院）
The de novo design of drug molecules is recognized as a time-consuming and costly process, and computational approaches have been applied in each stage of the drug discovery pipeline. Variational autoencoder is one of the computer-aided design methods which explores the chemical space based on existing molecular dataset. Quantum machine learning has emerged as an atypical learning method that may speed up some classical learning tasks because of its strong expressive power. However, near-term quantum computers suffer from limited number of qubits which hinders the representation learning in hi…
Target Specific De Novo Design of Drug Candidate Molecules with Graph Transformer-based Generative Adversarial Networks
Biological Data Science Lab, Dept. of Computer Engineering, Hacettepe University（哈切塔佩大学计算机工程系生物数据科学实验室）；Dept. of Computer Engineering, Hacettepe University（哈切塔佩大学计算机工程系）；Dept. of Chemistry, Middle East Technical University（中东技术大学化学系）；Dept. of Physics, Middle East Technical University（中东技术大学物理系）；Dept. Of Artificial Intelligence Engineering, Bahcesehir University（巴切塞希尔大学人工智能工程系）；Cancer Systems Biology Lab, Graduate School of Informatics, Middle East Technical University（中东技术大学信息研究生院癌症系统生物学实验室）；Dept. of Pharmaceutical Chemistry, Faculty of Pharmacy, Gazi University（加齐大学药学系药剂化学系）；Laboratory of Molecular Modeling, Evias Pharmaceutical R&D Ltd.（Evias制药研发有限公司分子建模实验室）；Dept. of Electrical and Electronics Engineering, İskenderun Technical University（伊斯肯德伦技术大学电子与电气工程系）；Institute for Computational Biomedicine, Heidelberg University（海德堡大学计算生物医学研究所）；Dept. of Bioinformatics, Graduate School of Health Sciences, Hacettepe University（哈切塔佩大学健康科学研究生院生物信息学系）
The new wave of successful generative models in machine learning has increased the interest in deep learning driven de novo drug design. However, assessing the performance of such generative models is notoriously difficult. Metrics that are typically used to assess the performance of such generative models are the percentage of chemically valid molecules or the similarity to real molecules in terms of particular descriptors, such as the partition coefficient (logP) or druglikeness. However, method comparison is difficult because of the inconsistent use of evaluation metrics, the necessity for …
Scaffold based drug discovery (SBDD) is a technique for drug discovery which pins chemical scaffolds as the framework of design. Scaffolds, or molecular frameworks, organize the design of compounds into local neighborhoods. We formalize scaffold based drug discovery into a network design. Utilizing docking data from SARS-CoV-2 virtual screening studies and JAK2 kinase assay data, we showcase how a scaffold based conception of chemical space is intuitive for design. Lastly, we highlight the utility of scaffold based networks for chemical space as a potential solution to the intractable enumerat…
Scaffold-Conditioned Preference Triplets for Controllable Molecular Optimization with Large Language Models
National Key Laboratory of Parallel and Distributed Processing（平行与分布式处理国家重点实验室）；College of Computer Science and Technology（计算机科学与技术学院）；National University of DefenseTechnology（国防科技大学）；DP Technology（DP科技）
Generating novel drug molecules with desired biological properties is a time consuming and complex task. Conditional generative adversarial models have recently been proposed as promising approaches for de novo drug design. In this paper, we propose a new generative model which extends an existing adversarial autoencoder (AAE) based model by stacking two models together. Our stacked approach generates more valid molecules, as well as molecules that are more similar to known drugs. We break down this challenging task into two sub-problems. A first stage model to learn primitive features from th…
Uncompetitive antagonists of the N-methyl D-aspartate receptor (NMDAR) have demonstrated therapeutic benefit in the treatment of neurological diseases such as Parkinson's and Alzheimer's, but some also cause dissociative effects that have led to the synthesis of illicit drugs. The ability to generate NMDAR antagonists in silico is therefore desirable both for new medication development and for preempting and identifying new designer drugs. Recently, generative deep learning models have been applied to de novo drug design as a means to expand the amount of chemical space that can be explored fo…
Structure-based drug design involves finding ligand molecules that exhibit structural and chemical complementarity to protein pockets. Deep generative methods have shown promise in proposing novel molecules from scratch (de-novo design), avoiding exhaustive virtual screening of chemical space. Most generative de-novo models fail to incorporate detailed ligand-protein interactions and 3D pocket structures. We propose a novel supervised model that generates molecular graphs jointly with 3D pose in a discretised molecular space. Molecules are built atom-by-atom inside pockets, guided by structura…
De novo design of molecules has recently enjoyed the power of generative deep neural networks. Current approaches aim to generate molecules either resembling the properties of the molecules of the training set or molecules that are optimized with respect to specific physicochemical properties. None of the methods generates molecules specific to a target protein. In the approach presented here, we introduce a method which is conditioned on the protein target sequence to generate de novo molecules that are relevant to the target. We use an implementation adapted from Google's "Show and Tell" ima…
One of the major applications of generative models for drug Discovery targets the lead-optimization phase. During the optimization of a lead series, it is common to have scaffold constraints imposed on the structure of the molecules designed. Without enforcing such constraints, the probability of generating molecules with the required scaffold is extremely low and hinders the practicality of generative models for de-novo drug design. To tackle this issue, we introduce a new algorithm to perform scaffold-constrained in-silico molecular design. We build on the well-known SMILES-based Recurrent N…
Recently, deep generative models for molecular graphs are gaining more and more attention in the field of de novo drug design. A variety of models have been developed to generate topological structures of drug-like molecules, but explorations in generating three-dimensional structures are still limited. Existing methods have either focused on low molecular weight compounds without considering drug-likeness or generate 3D structures indirectly using atom density maps. In this work, we introduce Ligand Neural Network (L-Net), a novel graph generative model for designing drug-like molecules with …
Finding drug-like compounds with high bioactivity is essential for drug discovery, but the task is complicated by the high cost of chemical synthesis and validation. With their outstanding performance in de novo drug design, deep generative models represent promising tools for tackling this challenge. In recently years, 3D molecule generative models have gained increasing attention due to their ability to directly utilize the 3D interaction information between the target and ligand. However, it remains challenging to synthesize the molecules generated by these models, limiting the speed of bio…
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…
TransCDR: a deep learning model for enhancing the generalizability of cancer drug response prediction through transfer learning and multimodal data fusion for drug representation
Shanghai Medical College, Fudan University（复旦大学上海医学院）；Shanghai Institute of Stem Cell Research and Clinical Translation（上海干细胞研究与临床转化研究院）；Shanghai World Foreign Language Academy（上海世界外国语中学）
xTrimoABFold: De novo Antibody Structure Prediction without MSA
BioMap Research（BioMap研究院）；Computer Network Information Center, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院计算机网络信息中心）；Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications（北京邮电大学）；MBZUAI（穆罕默德·本·扎耶德人工智能大学）
