No abstract

Generative models are becoming a tool of choice for exploring the molecular space. These models learn on a large training dataset and produce novel molecular structures with similar properties. Generated structures can be utilized for virtual screening or training semi-supervized predictive models in the downstream tasks. While there are plenty of generative models, it is unclear how to compare and rank them. In this work, we introduce a benchmarking platform called Molecular Sets (MOSES) to standardize training and comparison of molecular generative models. MOSES provides training and testing datasets, and a set of metrics to evaluate the quality and diversity of generated structures. We have implemented and compared several molecular generation models and suggest to use our results as reference points for further advancements in generative chemistry research. The platform and source code are available at https://github.com/molecularsets/moses.

Modern computational approaches and machine learning techniques accelerate the invention of new drugs. Generative models can discover novel molecular structures within hours, while conventional drug discovery pipelines require months of work. In this article, we propose a new generative architecture, entangled conditional adversarial autoencoder, that generates molecular structures based on various properties, such as activity against a specific protein, solubility, or ease of synthesis. We apply the proposed model to generate a novel inhibitor of Janus kinase 3, implicated in rheumatoid arthritis, psoriasis, and vitiligo. The discovered molecule was tested in vitro and showed good activity and selectivity.

Convolutional neural networks (CNN) have been successfully used to handle three-dimensional data and are a natural match for data with spatial structure such as 3D molecular structures. However, a direct 3D representation of a molecule with atoms localized at voxels is too sparse, which leads to poor performance of the CNNs. In this work, we present a novel approach where atoms are extended to fill other nearby voxels with a transformation based on the wave transform. Experimenting on 4.5 million molecules from the Zinc database, we show that our proposed representation leads to better performance of CNN-based autoencoders than either the voxel-based representation or the previously used Gaussian blur of atoms and then successfully apply the new representation to classification tasks such as MACCS fingerprint prediction.