Tong Wang

Kehan Wu, Yingce Xia, Yang Fan et al. · microsoft-research

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 state-of-the-art framework in deep learning), we design a variant of Transformer encoder to process 3D geometric information of targets and pre-train the Transformer decoder on 10 million compounds from PubChem for candidate drug generation. Systematical evaluation on candidate compounds generated for targets from DrugBank shows that both binding affinity and drugability are largely improved. TamGent outperforms previous baselines in terms of both effectiveness and efficiency. The method is further verified by generating candidate compounds for the SARS-CoV-2 main protease and the oncogenic mutant KRAS G12C. The results show that our method not only re-discovers previously verified drug molecules , but also generates novel molecules with better docking scores, expanding the compound pool and potentially leading to the discovery of novel drugs.

He Zhang, Siyuan Liu, Jiacheng You et al.

Orbital-free density functional theory (OFDFT) is a quantum chemistry formulation that has a lower cost scaling than the prevailing Kohn-Sham DFT, which is increasingly desired for contemporary molecular research. However, its accuracy is limited by the kinetic energy density functional, which is notoriously hard to approximate for non-periodic molecular systems. Here we propose M-OFDFT, an OFDFT approach capable of solving molecular systems using a deep learning functional model. We build the essential non-locality into the model, which is made affordable by the concise density representation as expansion coefficients under an atomic basis. With techniques to address unconventional learning challenges therein, M-OFDFT achieves a comparable accuracy with Kohn-Sham DFT on a wide range of molecules untouched by OFDFT before. More attractively, M-OFDFT extrapolates well to molecules much larger than those seen in training, which unleashes the appealing scaling of OFDFT for studying large molecules including proteins, representing an advancement of the accuracy-efficiency trade-off frontier in quantum chemistry.

Zimeng Li, Shichao Zhu, Bin Shao et al.

Drug-drug interaction (DDI) prediction provides a drug combination strategy for systemically effective treatment. Previous studies usually model drug information constrained on a single view such as the drug itself, leading to incomplete and noisy information, which limits the accuracy of DDI prediction. In this work, we propose a novel multi- view drug substructure network for DDI prediction (MSN-DDI), which learns chemical substructures from both the representations of the single drug (intra-view) and the drug pair (inter-view) simultaneously and utilizes the substructures to update the drug representation iteratively. Comprehensive evaluations demonstrate that MSN-DDI has almost solved DDI prediction for existing drugs by achieving a relatively improved accuracy of 19.32% and an over 99% accuracy under the transductive setting. More importantly, MSN-DDI exhibits better generalization ability to unseen drugs with a relatively improved accuracy of 7.07% under more challenging inductive scenarios. Finally, MSN-DDI improves prediction performance for real-world DDI applications to new drugs.

Yusong Wang, Shaoning Li, Zun Wang et al.

In the technical report, we provide our solution for OGB-LSC 2022 Graph Regression Task. The target of this task is to predict the quantum chemical property, HOMO-LUMO gap for a given molecule on PCQM4Mv2 dataset. In the competition, we designed two kinds of models: Transformer-M-ViSNet which is an geometry-enhanced graph neural network for fully connected molecular graphs and Pretrained-3D-ViSNet which is a pretrained ViSNet by distilling geomeotric information from optimized structures. With an ensemble of 22 models, ViSNet Team achieved the MAE of 0.0723 eV on the test-challenge set, dramatically reducing the error by 39.75% compared with the best method in the last year competition.

Jinhua Zhu, Yingce Xia, Chang Liu et al.

Molecular conformation generation aims to generate three-dimensional coordinates of all the atoms in a molecule and is an important task in bioinformatics and pharmacology. Previous methods usually first predict the interatomic distances, the gradients of interatomic distances or the local structures (e.g., torsion angles) of a molecule, and then reconstruct its 3D conformation. How to directly generate the conformation without the above intermediate values is not fully explored. In this work, we propose a method that directly predicts the coordinates of atoms: (1) the loss function is invariant to roto-translation of coordinates and permutation of symmetric atoms; (2) the newly proposed model adaptively aggregates the bond and atom information and iteratively refines the coordinates of the generated conformation. Our method achieves the best results on GEOM-QM9 and GEOM-Drugs datasets. Further analysis shows that our generated conformations have closer properties (e.g., HOMO-LUMO gap) with the groundtruth conformations. In addition, our method improves molecular docking by providing better initial conformations. All the results demonstrate the effectiveness of our method and the great potential of the direct approach. The code is released at https://github.com/DirectMolecularConfGen/DMCG

Juan-Ni Wu, Tong Wang, Li-Juan Tang et al.

Language models demonstrate fundamental abilities in syntax, semantics, and reasoning, though their performance often depends significantly on the inputs they process. This study introduces TSIS (Simplified TSID) and its variants:TSISD (TSIS with Depth-First Search), TSISO (TSIS in Order), and TSISR (TSIS in Random), as integral components of the t-SMILES framework. These additions complete the framework's design, providing diverse approaches to molecular representation. Through comprehensive analysis and experiments employing deep generative models, including GPT, diffusion models, and reinforcement learning, the findings reveal that the hierarchical structure of t-SMILES is more straightforward to parse than initially anticipated. Furthermore, t-SMILES consistently outperforms other linear representations such as SMILES, SELFIES, and SAFE, demonstrating superior convergence speed and enhanced generalization capabilities.

Siyuan Liu, Yusong Wang, Tong Wang et al.

The identification of active binding drugs for target proteins (termed as drug-target interaction prediction) is the key challenge in virtual screening, which plays an essential role in drug discovery. Although recent deep learning-based approaches achieved better performance than molecular docking, existing models often neglect certain aspects of the intermolecular information, hindering the performance of prediction. We recognize this problem and propose a novel approach named Intermolecular Graph Transformer (IGT) that employs a dedicated attention mechanism to model intermolecular information with a three-way Transformer-based architecture. IGT outperforms state-of-the-art approaches by 9.1% and 20.5% over the second best for binding activity and binding pose prediction respectively, and shows superior generalization ability to unseen receptor proteins. Furthermore, IGT exhibits promising drug screening ability against SARS-CoV-2 by identifying 83.1% active drugs that have been validated by wet-lab experiments with near-native predicted binding poses.