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 domains, deep learning techniques have been applied to DTA prediction. However, these methods consider either label/one-hot encodings or the topological structure of molecules, without considering the local chemical context of amino acids and SMILES sequences. Motivated by this, we propose a novel end-to-end learning framework, called DeepGS, which uses deep neural networks to extract the local chemical context from amino acids and SMILES sequences, as well as the molecular structure from the drugs. To assist the operations on the symbolic data, we propose to use advanced embedding techniques (i.e., Smi2Vec and Prot2Vec) to encode the amino acids and SMILES sequences to a distributed representation. Meanwhile, we suggest a new molecular structure modeling approach that works well under our framework. We have conducted extensive experiments to compare our proposed method with state-of-the-art models including KronRLS, SimBoost, DeepDTA and DeepCPI. Extensive experimental results demonstrate the superiorities and competitiveness of DeepGS.
DrugCLIP: Contrastive Protein-Molecule Representation Learning for Virtual Screening
Institute for AI Industry Research（人工智能产业研究院）；Tsinghua University（清华大学）；Peking University（北京大学）；Institute of Automation（自动化研究所）；Chinese Academy of Science（中国科学院）
Associative Learning Mechanism for Drug-Target Interaction Prediction
Chongqing University of Posts and Telecommunications（重庆邮电大学）；State University of New York at Buffalo State（纽约州立大学布法罗州立学院）；DH (Shanghai) Diagnostics Co.,Ltd.（DH（上海）诊断有限公司）
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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 …
Motivation: Predicting the drug-target interaction is crucial for drug discovery as well as drug repurposing. Machine learning is commonly used in drug-target affinity (DTA) problem. However, machine learning model faces the cold-start problem where the model performance drops when predicting the interaction of a novel drug or target. Previous works try to solve the cold start problem by learning the drug or target representation using unsupervised learning. While the drug or target representation can be learned in an unsupervised manner, it still lacks the interaction information, which is cr…
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…
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…
Huazhong Agricultural University（华中农业大学）；College of Informatics, Huazhong Agricultural University（华中农业大学信息学院）
The identification of drug-target binding affinity (DTA) has attracted increasing attention in the drug discovery process due to the more specific interpretation than binary interaction prediction. Recently, numerous deep learning-based computational methods have been proposed to predict the binding affinities between drugs and targets benefiting from their satisfactory performance. However, the previous works mainly focus on encoding biological features and chemical structures of drugs and targets, with a lack of exploiting the essential topological information from the drug-target affinity n…
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…
Predicting the interaction between a compound and a target is crucial for rapid drug repurposing. Deep learning has been successfully applied in drug-target affinity (DTA) problem. However, previous deep learning-based methods ignore modeling the direct interactions between drug and protein residues. This would lead to inaccurate learning of target representation which may change due to the drug binding effects. In addition, previous DTA methods learn protein representation solely based on a small number of protein sequences in DTA datasets while neglecting the use of proteins outside of the D…
Co-Diffusion: An Affinity-Aware Two-Stage Latent Diffusion Framework for Generalizable Drug-Target Affinity Prediction
School of Computer Science and Engineering, Northeastern University（东北大学计算机科学与工程学院）；College of Information Science and Engineering, Northeastern University（东北大学信息科学与工程学院）；Westlake University（西湖大学）；School of Artificial Intelligence, Beihang University（北航人工智能学院）；Key Laboratory of Bioresource Research and Development of Liaoning Province, College of Life and Health Sciences, Northeastern University（辽宁省生物资源研究开发重点实验室，东北大学生命与健康科学学院）
Can AI-predicted complexes teach machine learning to compute drug binding affinity?
Department of Biochemistry, University of Oxford, South Parks Road, Oxford, OX1 3QU, UK；Department of Chemistry, University of Oxford, Mansfield Road, Oxford, OX1 3TA, UK；Boehringer Ingelheim Pharma GmbH \& Co. KG, Birkendorfer Str. 65, 88397 Biberach an der Riß, Germany
Learning distributions of graphs can be used for automatic drug discovery, molecular design, complex network analysis, and much more. We present an improved framework for learning generative models of graphs based on the idea of deep state machines. To learn state transition decisions we use a set of graph and node embedding techniques as memory of the state machine. Our analysis is based on learning the distribution of random graph generators for which we provide statistical tests to determine which properties can be learned and how well the original distribution of graphs is represented. We …
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）
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…
ViDTA: Enhanced Drug-Target Affinity Prediction via Virtual Graph Nodes and Attention-based Feature Fusion
School of Software Engineering Huazhong University of Science；School of Cyber Science；Engineering Huazhong University of Science；Union Hospital, Tongji Medical College Huazhong University of Science
Generation of drug-like molecules with high binding affinity to target proteins remains a difficult and resource-intensive task in drug discovery. Existing approaches primarily employ reinforcement learning, Markov sampling, or deep generative models guided by Gaussian processes, which can be prohibitively slow when generating molecules with high binding affinity calculated by computationally-expensive physics-based methods. We present Latent Inceptionism on Molecules (LIMO), which significantly accelerates molecule generation with an inceptionism-like technique. LIMO employs a variational aut…
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…
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…
University of Pittsburgh（匹兹堡大学）；Carnegie Mellon University（卡内基梅隆大学）
To design a drug given a biological molecule by using deep learning methods, there are many successful models published recently. People commonly used generative models to design new molecules given certain protein. LiGAN was regarded as the baseline of deep learning model which was developed on convolutional neural networks. Recently, GraphBP showed its ability to predict innovative "real" chemicals that the binding affinity outperformed with traditional molecular docking methods by using a flow-based generative model with a graph neural network and multilayer perception. However, all those m…
Argonne National Laboratory（阿贡国家实验室）；Pacific Northwest National Laboratory（太平洋西北国家实验室）
Design of new drug compounds with target properties is a key area of research in generative modeling. We present a small drug molecule design pipeline based on graph-generative models and a comparison study of two state-of-the-art graph generative models for designing COVID-19 targeted drug candidates: 1) a variational autoencoder-based approach (VAE) that uses prior knowledge of molecules that have been shown to be effective for earlier coronavirus treatments and 2) a deep Q-learning method (DQN) that generates optimized molecules without any proximity constraints. We evaluate the novelty of …
University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign（伊利诺伊大学厄巴纳-香槟分校）；Peking University（北京大学）；Tsinghua University（清华大学）
Rich data and powerful machine learning models allow us to design drugs for a specific protein target \textit{in silico}. Recently, the inclusion of 3D structures during targeted drug design shows superior performance to other target-free models as the atomic interaction in the 3D space is explicitly modeled. However, current 3D target-aware models either rely on the voxelized atom densities or the autoregressive sampling process, which are not equivariant to rotation or easily violate geometric constraints resulting in unrealistic structures. In this work, we develop a 3D equivariant diffusio…
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…
Shenzhen University（深圳大学）；Tencent AI Lab（腾讯人工智能实验室）
Binding affinity prediction of three-dimensional (3D) protein ligand complexes is critical for drug repositioning and virtual drug screening. Existing approaches transform a 3D protein-ligand complex to a two-dimensional (2D) graph, and then use graph neural networks (GNNs) to predict its binding affinity. However, the node and edge features of the 2D graph are extracted based on invariant local coordinate systems of the 3D complex. As a result, the method can not fully learn the global information of the complex, such as, the physical symmetry and the topological information of bonds. To addr…
The cornerstone of computational drug design is the calculation of binding affinity between two biological counterparts, especially a chemical compound, i.e., a ligand, and a protein. Predicting the strength of protein-ligand binding with reasonable accuracy is critical for drug discovery. In this paper, we propose a data-driven framework named DeepAtom to accurately predict the protein-ligand binding affinity. With 3D Convolutional Neural Network (3D-CNN) architecture, DeepAtom could automatically extract binding related atomic interaction patterns from the voxelized complex structure. Compar…
University of Science and Technology of China（中国科学技术大学）；Baidu Research（百度研究院）；Baidu Inc.（百度公司）；Baidu Research USA（百度美国研究院）；Oregon State University（俄勒冈州立大学）；HWL Consulting LLC（HWL咨询有限责任公司）；Rutgers University（罗格斯大学）
Drug discovery often relies on the successful prediction of protein-ligand binding affinity. Recent advances have shown great promise in applying graph neural networks (GNNs) for better affinity prediction by learning the representations of protein-ligand complexes. However, existing solutions usually treat protein-ligand complexes as topological graph data, thus the biomolecular structural information is not fully utilized. The essential long-range interactions among atoms are also neglected in GNN models. To this end, we propose a structure-aware interactive graph neural network (SIGN) which…
