De novo drug design by iterative multiobjective deep reinforcement learning with graph-based molecular quality assessment

Abstract Motivation Generating molecules of high quality and drug-likeness in the vast chemical space is a big challenge in the drug discovery. Most existing molecule generative methods focus on diversity and novelty of molecules, but ignoring drug potentials of the generated molecules during the ge...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Bioinformatics (Oxford, England) England), 2023-04, Vol.39 (4)
Main Authors: Fang, Yi, Pan, Xiaoyong, Shen, Hong-Bin
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Drug Design
Models, Molecular
Neural Networks, Computer
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Summary:Abstract Motivation Generating molecules of high quality and drug-likeness in the vast chemical space is a big challenge in the drug discovery. Most existing molecule generative methods focus on diversity and novelty of molecules, but ignoring drug potentials of the generated molecules during the generation process. Results In this study, we present a novel de novo multiobjective quality assessment-based drug design approach (QADD), which integrates an iterative refinement framework with a novel graph-based molecular quality assessment model on drug potentials. QADD designs a multiobjective deep reinforcement learning pipeline to generate molecules with multiple desired properties iteratively, where a graph neural network-based model for accurate molecular quality assessment on drug potentials is introduced to guide molecule generation. Experimental results show that QADD can jointly optimize multiple molecular properties with a promising performance and the quality assessment module is capable of guiding the generated molecules with high drug potentials. Furthermore, applying QADD to generate novel molecules binding to a biological target protein DRD2 also demonstrates the algorithm’s efficacy. Availability and implementation QADD is freely available online for academic use at https://github.com/yifang000/QADD or http://www.csbio.sjtu.edu.cn/bioinf/QADD.
ISSN:1367-4811
1367-4803
1367-4811
DOI:10.1093/bioinformatics/btad157