SCAFFOLDGPT: A Scaffold-based GPT Model for Drug Optimization
1. SCAFFOLDGPT is a new GPT-based framework designed to optimize drugs by preserving the core scaffold of existing molecules while improving pharmaceutical properties like druglikeness, synthesizability, docking scores, and solubility.
2. Unlike De Novo generation, SCAFFOLDGPT focuses on refining FDA-approved drugs, making it more efficient for fighting rapidly mutating viruses (like SARS-CoV-2) and drug-resistant cancers.
3. The core innovation lies in its three-stage pipeline: pretraining on SMILES data, reinforcement learning finetuning with Advantage-aligned Policy Optimization (APO), and a novel token-level decoding strategy called TOP-N.
4. The two-phase incremental pretraining scheme first trains the model on molecules alone, then on scaffold–molecule pairs, effectively teaching the model to generate molecules conditionally based on a given scaffold.
5. The second stage employs APO to align molecule generation with multiple objectives: druglikeness, solubility, synthesizability, docking score, and scaffold similarity, using a reward function built from ensemble critics.
6. The third stage, TOP-N decoding, improves controllability by guiding token selection based on reward optimization rather than just likelihood, outperforming traditional decoding methods like top-k or nucleus sampling in benchmark tests.
7. Compared to state-of-the-art methods such as REINVENT4 and DrugImprover, SCAFFOLDGPT achieves superior results on cancer and COVID datasets, balancing property enhancement with scaffold preservation.
8. Ablation studies show that both APO and TOP-N significantly contribute to performance gains, while the incremental training improves generation validity—especially for longer sequences.
9. SCAFFOLDGPT demonstrates consistent property improvements across benchmarks while retaining high similarity to original molecules, making it a practical and effective tool for real-world drug optimization.
💻Code: https://t.co/xEoadoh5ac
📜Paper: https://t.co/bbx92E3ZQT
#DrugDiscovery #AI4Science #MolecularDesign #GenerativeAI #ReinforcementLearning #GPT #ComputationalBiology #DrugOptimization
Icotrokinra is a potential first-in-class, orally bioavailable macrocyclic peptide antagonist of IL-23R, currently in clinical trials for multiple inflammatory diseases.
This article highlights compelling late-stage clinical trial data supporting icotrokinra’s potential to rival biologics, and explores how this molecule could reshape treatment paradigms for a range of inflammatory conditions.
Read more: https://t.co/W3thL7jSzi
The code & camera-ready version of our #ICLR2025 paper on "Multi-domain Distribution Learning for De Novo Drug Design" are now available
📚 Paper: https://t.co/NCeHVltqm8
💻 Code: https://t.co/0GGMiOODla
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A long context RNA foundation model for predicting transcriptome architecture
• LoRNASH redefines RNA modeling: This foundation model predicts transcriptome architecture directly from long RNA sequences, capturing both structure and abundance of RNA isoforms with unparalleled accuracy.
• Groundbreaking long-context capability: LoRNASH processes sequences up to 65,000 nucleotides, enabling precise modeling of complex RNA interactions, overcoming limitations faced by previous models like SpliceAI and Nucleotide Transformer.
• Leveraging long-read sequencing data: The model is trained on PacBio IsoSeq data from 26 cancer cell lines and incorporates both human and mouse datasets, totaling 7 billion tokens across 297,726 unique transcripts.
• Zero-shot performance excellence: LoRNASH achieves remarkable success in diverse prediction tasks without fine-tuning, including absolute isoform abundance, exon trapping, and pathogenic non-coding variant analysis.
• Next-level generative capability: LoRNASH can generate synthetic transcripts that mirror real-world RNA structures, opening avenues for transgene design and splicing regulation studies.
• Enhances biomedical research: With high precision in modeling alternative splicing and identifying cis-regulatory elements, the model accelerates our understanding of transcriptome dynamics and disease-associated variations.
@genophoria@hsnajafabadi@AminMEmad@vram142@MNaghipourfar@ahcorcha@choi_benedict
💻Code: https://t.co/nHRhAHbJyD
📜Paper: https://t.co/Ynu7ZDclCX
@rohanpaul_ai I’ve made a calculator that does a similar estimate so you can change things in the UI.
App: https://t.co/AjKen1qFQg
Open Source code:
https://t.co/ZHSbb6OmoX
Announcing AlphaFold 3: our state-of-the-art AI model for predicting the structure and interactions of all life’s molecules. 🧬
Here’s how we built it with @IsomorphicLabs and what it means for biology. 🧵 https://t.co/gjw6Ip4F2M