Xibao Cai

Xiaoqing Lian, Pengsen Ma, Tengfeng Ma et al.

Motivation: The scalable identification of bioactive compounds is essential for contemporary drug discovery. This process faces a key trade-off: structural screening offers scalability but lacks biological context, whereas high-content phenotypic profiling provides deep biological insights but is resource-intensive. The primary challenge is to extract robust biological signals from noisy data and encode them into representations that do not require biological data at inference. Results: This study presents DECODE (DEcomposing Cellular Observations of Drug Effects), a framework that bridges this gap by empowering chemical representations with intrinsic biological semantics to enable structure-based in silico biological profiling. DECODE leverages limited paired transcriptomic and morphological data as supervisory signals during training, enabling the extraction of a measurement-invariant biological fingerprint from chemical structures and explicit filtering of experimental noise. Our evaluations demonstrate that DECODE retrieves functionally similar drugs in zero-shot settings with over 20% relative improvement over chemical baselines in mechanism-of-action (MOA) prediction. Furthermore, the framework achieves a 6-fold increase in hit rates for novel anti-cancer agents during external validation. Availability and implementation: The codes and datasets of DECODE are available at https://github.com/lian-xiao/DECODE.

Geyan Ye, Xibao Cai, Houtim Lai et al.

Recently, the impressive performance of large language models (LLMs) on a wide range of tasks has attracted an increasing number of attempts to apply LLMs in drug discovery. However, molecule optimization, a critical task in the drug discovery pipeline, is currently an area that has seen little involvement from LLMs. Most of existing approaches focus solely on capturing the underlying patterns in chemical structures provided by the data, without taking advantage of expert feedback. These non-interactive approaches overlook the fact that the drug discovery process is actually one that requires the integration of expert experience and iterative refinement. To address this gap, we propose DrugAssist, an interactive molecule optimization model which performs optimization through human-machine dialogue by leveraging LLM's strong interactivity and generalizability. DrugAssist has achieved leading results in both single and multiple property optimization, simultaneously showcasing immense potential in transferability and iterative optimization. In addition, we publicly release a large instruction-based dataset called MolOpt-Instructions for fine-tuning language models on molecule optimization tasks. We have made our code and data publicly available at https://github.com/blazerye/DrugAssist, which we hope to pave the way for future research in LLMs' application for drug discovery.