Phenotypic Profile-Informed Generation of Drug-Like Molecules via Dual-Channel Variational Autoencoders

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Autori principali: Liu, Hui, Tian, Shiye, Liu, Xuejun
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2025
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author Liu, Hui
Tian, Shiye
Liu, Xuejun
author_facet Liu, Hui
Tian, Shiye
Liu, Xuejun
contents The de novo generation of drug-like molecules capable of inducing desirable phenotypic changes is receiving increasing attention. However, previous methods predominantly rely on expression profiles to guide molecule generation, but overlook the perturbative effect of the molecules on cellular contexts. To overcome this limitation, we propose SmilesGEN, a novel generative model based on variational autoencoder (VAE) architecture to generate molecules with potential therapeutic effects. SmilesGEN integrates a pre-trained drug VAE (SmilesNet) with an expression profile VAE (ProfileNet), jointly modeling the interplay between drug perturbations and transcriptional responses in a common latent space. Specifically, ProfileNet is imposed to reconstruct pre-treatment expression profiles when eliminating drug-induced perturbations in the latent space, while SmilesNet is informed by desired expression profiles to generate drug-like molecules. Our empirical experiments demonstrate that SmilesGEN outperforms current state-of-the-art models in generating molecules with higher degree of validity, uniqueness, novelty, as well as higher Tanimoto similarity to known ligands targeting the relevant proteins. Moreover, we evaluate SmilesGEN for scaffold-based molecule optimization and generation of therapeutic agents, and confirmed its superior performance in generating molecules with higher similarity to approved drugs. SmilesGEN establishes a robust framework that leverages gene signatures to generate drug-like molecules that hold promising potential to induce desirable cellular phenotypic changes.
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id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2506_02051
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publishDate 2025
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spellingShingle Phenotypic Profile-Informed Generation of Drug-Like Molecules via Dual-Channel Variational Autoencoders
Liu, Hui
Tian, Shiye
Liu, Xuejun
Biomolecules
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
The de novo generation of drug-like molecules capable of inducing desirable phenotypic changes is receiving increasing attention. However, previous methods predominantly rely on expression profiles to guide molecule generation, but overlook the perturbative effect of the molecules on cellular contexts. To overcome this limitation, we propose SmilesGEN, a novel generative model based on variational autoencoder (VAE) architecture to generate molecules with potential therapeutic effects. SmilesGEN integrates a pre-trained drug VAE (SmilesNet) with an expression profile VAE (ProfileNet), jointly modeling the interplay between drug perturbations and transcriptional responses in a common latent space. Specifically, ProfileNet is imposed to reconstruct pre-treatment expression profiles when eliminating drug-induced perturbations in the latent space, while SmilesNet is informed by desired expression profiles to generate drug-like molecules. Our empirical experiments demonstrate that SmilesGEN outperforms current state-of-the-art models in generating molecules with higher degree of validity, uniqueness, novelty, as well as higher Tanimoto similarity to known ligands targeting the relevant proteins. Moreover, we evaluate SmilesGEN for scaffold-based molecule optimization and generation of therapeutic agents, and confirmed its superior performance in generating molecules with higher similarity to approved drugs. SmilesGEN establishes a robust framework that leverages gene signatures to generate drug-like molecules that hold promising potential to induce desirable cellular phenotypic changes.
title Phenotypic Profile-Informed Generation of Drug-Like Molecules via Dual-Channel Variational Autoencoders
topic Biomolecules
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.02051