Virtual Screening: A Challenge for Deep Learning

On the ability of machine learning methods to discover novel scaffolds

The recent advances in the application of machine learning to drug discovery have made it a 'hot topic' for research, with hundreds of academic groups and companies integrating machine learning into their drug discovery projects. Nevertheless, there remains great uncertainty regarding the most appropriate ways to evaluate the relative performance of these powerful methods against more traditional cheminformatics approaches, and many pitfalls remain for the unwary. In 2020, researchers at MIT (Stokes et al., Cell 180(4), 688-702, 2020) reported the discovery of a new compound with antibacterial activity, halicin, through the use of a neural network machine learning method. A robust ability to identify new active chemotypes through computational methods would be very useful. In this study, we have used the Stokes et al. dataset to compare the performance of this method to two other approaches, Mapping of Activity Through Dichotomic Scores (MADS) by Todeschini et al. (J Chemom 32(4):e2994, 2018) and Random Matrix Theory (RMT) by Lee et al. (Proc Natl Acad Sci 116(9):3373-3378, 2019). Our results demonstrate that all three methods are capable of predicting halicin as an active antibacterial compound, but that this result is dependent on the dataset composition, pre-processing and the molecular fingerprint used. We have further assessed overall performance as determined by several performance metrics. We also investigated the scaffold hopping potential of the methods by modifying the dataset by removal of the β-lactam and fluoroquinolone chemotypes. MADS and RMT are able to identify actives in the test set that contained these substructures. This ability arises because of high scoring fragments of the withheld chemotypes that are in common with other active antibiotic classes. Interestingly, MADS is relatively better compared to the other two methods based on general predictive performance.

An Analysis of QSAR Research Based on Machine Learning Concepts

Quantitative Structure-Activity Relationship (QSAR) is a popular approach developed to correlate chemical molecules with their biological activities based on their chemical structures. Machine learning techniques have proved to be promising solutions to QSAR modeling. Due to the significant role of machine learning strategies in QSAR modeling, this area of research has attracted much attention from researchers. A considerable amount of literature has been published on machine learning based QSAR modeling methodologies whilst this domain still suffers from lack of a recent and comprehensive analysis of these algorithms. This study systematically reviews the application of machine learning algorithms in QSAR, aiming to provide an analytical framework. For this purpose, we present a framework called 'ML-QSAR'. This framework has been designed for future research to: a) facilitate the selection of proper strategies among existing algorithms according to the application area requirements, b) help to develop and ameliorate current methods and c) providing a platform to study existing methodologies comparatively. In ML-QSAR, first a structured categorization is depicted which studied the QSAR modeling research based on machine models. Then several criteria are introduced in order to assess the models. Finally, inspired by aforementioned criteria the qualitative analysis is carried out.

Deep learning in pharmacogenomics: from gene regulation to patient stratification

This Perspective provides examples of current and future applications of deep learning in pharmacogenomics, including: identification of novel regulatory variants located in noncoding domains of the genome and their function as applied to pharmacoepigenomics; patient stratification from medical records; and the mechanistic prediction of drug response, targets and their interactions. Deep learning encapsulates a family of machine learning algorithms that has transformed many important subfields of artificial intelligence over the last decade, and has demonstrated breakthrough performance improvements on a wide range of tasks in biomedicine. We anticipate that in the future, deep learning will be widely used to predict personalized drug response and optimize medication selection and dosing, using knowledge extracted from large and complex molecular, epidemiological, clinical and demographic datasets.

Active learning for computational chemogenomics

Aim: Computational chemogenomics models the compound–protein interaction space, typically for drug discovery, where existing methods predominantly either incorporate increasing numbers of bioactivity samples or focus on specific subfamilies of proteins and ligands. As an alternative to modeling entire large datasets at once, active learning adaptively incorporates a minimum of informative examples for modeling, yielding compact but high quality models. Results/methodology: We assessed active learning for protein/target family-wide chemogenomic modeling by replicate experiment. Results demonstrate that small yet highly predictive models can be extracted from only 10–25% of large bioactivity datasets, irrespective of molecule descriptors used. Conclusion: Chemogenomic active learning identifies small subsets of ligand–target interactions in a large screening database that lead to knowledge discovery and highly predictive models.