Motif2Mol: Prediction of New Active Compounds Based on Sequence Motifs of Ligand Binding Sites in Proteins Using a Biochemical Language Model

Advancing drug discovery with deep attention neural networks

In the dynamic field of drug discovery, deep attention neural networks are revolutionizing our approach to complex data. This review explores the attention mechanism and its extended architectures, including graph attention networks (GATs), transformers, bidirectional encoder representations from transformers (BERT), generative pre-trained transformers (GPTs) and bidirectional and auto-regressive transformers (BART). Delving into their core principles and multifaceted applications, we uncover their pivotal roles in catalyzing de novo drug design, predicting intricate molecular properties and deciphering elusive drug-target interactions. Despite challenges, these attention-based architectures hold unparalleled promise to drive transformative breakthroughs and accelerate progress in pharmaceutical research.

Generative design of compounds with desired potency from target protein sequences using a multimodal biochemical language model

Deep learning models adapted from natural language processing offer new opportunities for the prediction of active compounds via machine translation of sequential molecular data representations. For example, chemical language models are often derived for compound string transformation. Moreover, given the principal versatility of language models for translating different types of textual representations, off-the-beaten-path design tasks might be explored. In this work, we have investigated generative design of active compounds with desired potency from target sequence embeddings, representing a rather provoking prediction task. Therefore, a dual-component conditional language model was designed for learning from multimodal data. It comprised a protein language model component for generating target sequence embeddings and a conditional transformer for predicting new active compounds with desired potency. To this end, the designated "biochemical" language model was trained to learn mappings of combined protein sequence and compound potency value embeddings to corresponding compounds, fine-tuned on individual activity classes not encountered during model derivation, and evaluated on compound test sets that were structurally distinct from training sets. The biochemical language model correctly reproduced known compounds with different potency for all activity classes, providing proof-of-concept for the approach. Furthermore, the conditional model consistently reproduced larger numbers of known compounds as well as more potent compounds than an unconditional model, revealing a substantial effect of potency conditioning. The biochemical language model also generated structurally diverse candidate compounds departing from both fine-tuning and test compounds. Overall, generative compound design based on potency value-conditioned target sequence embeddings yielded promising results, rendering the approach attractive for further exploration and practical applications. SCIENTIFIC CONTRIBUTION: The approach introduced herein combines protein language model and chemical language model components, representing an advanced architecture, and is the first methodology for predicting compounds with desired potency from conditioned protein sequence data.

Chemical language models for molecular design

In drug discovery, chemical language models (CLMs) originating from natural language processing offer new opportunities for molecular design. CLMs have been developed using recurrent neural network (RNN) or transformer architectures. For the predictive performance of RNN-based encoder-decoder frameworks and transformers, attention mechanisms play a central role. Among others, emerging application areas for CLMs include constrained generative modeling and the prediction of chemical reactions or drug-target interactions. Since CLMs are applicable to any compound or target data that can be presented in a sequential format and tokenized, mappings of different types of sequences can be learned. For example, active compounds can be predicted from protein sequence motifs. Novel off-the-beat-path applications can also be considered. For example, analogue series from medicinal chemistry can be perceived and represented as chemical sequences and extended with new compounds using CLMs. Herein, methodological features of CLMs and different applications are discussed.

Attention is all you need: utilizing attention in AI-enabled drug discovery

Recently, attention mechanism and derived models have gained significant traction in drug development due to their outstanding performance and interpretability in handling complex data structures. This review offers an in-depth exploration of the principles underlying attention-based models and their advantages in drug discovery. We further elaborate on their applications in various aspects of drug development, from molecular screening and target binding to property prediction and molecule generation. Finally, we discuss the current challenges faced in the application of attention mechanisms and Artificial Intelligence technologies, including data quality, model interpretability and computational resource constraints, along with future directions for research. Given the accelerating pace of technological advancement, we believe that attention-based models will have an increasingly prominent role in future drug discovery. We anticipate that these models will usher in revolutionary breakthroughs in the pharmaceutical domain, significantly accelerating the pace of drug development.