Luhua Lai

Youjun Xu, Jinchuan Xiao, Chia-Han Chou et al.

Molecular structures are always depicted as 2D printed form in scientific documents like journal papers and patents. However, these 2D depictions are not machine-readable. Due to a backlog of decades and an increasing amount of these printed literature, there is a high demand for the translation of printed depictions into machine-readable formats, which is known as Optical Chemical Structure Recognition (OCSR). Most OCSR systems developed over the last three decades follow a rule-based approach where the key step of vectorization of the depiction is based on the interpretation of vectors and nodes as bonds and atoms. Here, we present a practical software MolMiner, which is primarily built up using deep neural networks originally developed for semantic segmentation and object detection to recognize atom and bond elements from documents. These recognized elements can be easily connected as a molecular graph with distance-based construction algorithm. We carefully evaluate our software on four benchmark datasets with the state-of-the-art performance. Various real application scenarios are also tested, yielding satisfactory outcomes. The free download links of Mac and Windows versions are available: Mac: https://molminer-cdn.iipharma.cn/pharma-mind/artifact/latest/mac/PharmaMind-mac-latest-setup.dmg and Windows: https://molminer-cdn.iipharma.cn/pharma-mind/artifact/latest/win/PharmaMind-win-latest-setup.exe

Junren Li, Luhua Lai

Generative artificial intelligence has revolutionized the exploration of chemical space, yet a critical bottleneck remains that a substantial fraction of generated molecules is synthetically inaccessible. Current solutions, such as post-hoc filtering or projection-based methods, often compromise structural novelty or disrupt key pharmacophores by forcing molecules into pre-defined synthetic templates. Herein, we introduce SynCraft, a reasoning-based framework that reframes synthesizability optimization not as a sequence translation task, but as a precise structural editing problem. Leveraging the emergent reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models, SynCraft navigates the "synthesis cliff" where minimal structural modifications yield significant gains in synthetic feasibility. By predicting executable sequences of atom-level edits rather than generating SMILES strings directly, SynCraft circumvents the syntactic fragility of LLMs while harnessing their chemical intuition. Extensive benchmarks demonstrate that SynCraft outperforms state-of-the-art baselines in generating synthesizable analogs with high structural fidelity. Furthermore, through interaction-aware prompting, SynCraft successfully replicates expert medicinal chemistry intuition in editing PLK1 inhibitors and rescuing high-scoring but previously discarded RIPK1 candidates in previous molecular generation literatures.

Yibo Li, Jianfeng Pei, Luhua Lai

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 high-quality 3D structures. L-Net directly outputs the topological and 3D structure of molecules (including hydrogen atoms), without the need for additional atom placement or bond order inference algorithm. The architecture of L-Net is specifically optimized for drug-like molecules, and a set of metrics is assembled to comprehensively evaluate its performance. The results show that L-Net is capable of generating chemically correct, conformationally valid, and highly druglike molecules. Finally, to demonstrate its potential in structure-based molecular design, we combine L-Net with MCTS and test its ability to generate potential inhibitors targeting ABL1 kinase.

Youjun Xu, Jianfeng Pei, Luhua Lai

For quantitative structure-property relationship (QSPR) studies in chemoinformatics, it is important to get interpretable relationship between chemical properties and chemical features. However, the predictive power and interpretability of QSPR models are usually two different objectives that are difficult to achieve simultaneously. A deep learning architecture using molecular graph encoding convolutional neural networks (MGE-CNN) provided a universal strategy to construct interpretable QSPR models with high predictive power. Instead of using application-specific preset molecular descriptors or fingerprints, the models can be resolved using raw and pertinent features without manual intervention or selection. In this study, we developed acute oral toxicity (AOT) models of compounds using the MGE-CNN architecture as a case study. Three types of high-level predictive models: regression model (deepAOT-R), multi-classification model (deepAOT-C) and multi-task model (deepAOT-CR) for AOT evaluation were constructed. These models highly outperformed previously reported models. For the two external datasets containing 1673 (test set I) and 375 (test set II) compounds, the R2 and mean absolute error (MAE) of deepAOT-R on the test set I were 0.864 and 0.195, and the prediction accuracy of deepAOT-C was 95.5% and 96.3% on the test set I and II, respectively. The two external prediction accuracy of deepAOT-CR is 95.0% and 94.1%, while the R2 and MAE are 0.861 and 0.204 for test set I, respectively.