Designing effective mRNA sequences for therapeutics remains a formidable challenge. Inspired by successes in protein design, language models (LMs) are now being applied to RNA, but progress is often impeded by the lack of comprehensive training data. Existing models are frequently limited to UTR or CDS regions, restricting their application for complete mRNA sequences. We introduce mRNABERT, a robust, all-in-one mRNA designer pre-trained on the largest available mRNA dataset. To enhance performance, we propose a dual tokenization scheme with a cross-modality contrastive learning framework to integrate semantic information from protein sequences. On a comprehensive benchmark, mRNABERT demonstrates state-of-the-art performance, outperforming previous models in the majority of tasks for 5’ UTR and CDS design, RNA-binding protein (RBP) site prediction, and full-length mRNA property prediction. It also surpasses large protein models in several related tasks. In conclusion, mRNABERT’s superior performance across these diverse tasks signifies a substantial leap forward in mRNA research and therapeutic development. Designing complete mRNA sequences for new vaccines and therapies is a complex challenge. Here, the authors develop mRNABERT, a foundational AI model that designs entire mRNA sequences and demonstrates superior performance across comprehensive benchmarks.
Ying Xiong, Aowen Wang, Yu Kang et al.· Nature Communications· 22 citations· ⚡1
The integration of large language models (LLMs) into drug design is gaining momentum; however, existing approaches often struggle to effectively incorporate three-dimensional molecular structures. Here, we present Token-Mol, a token-only 3D drug design model that encodes both 2D and 3D structural information, along with molecular properties, into discrete tokens. Built on a transformer decoder and trained with causal masking, Token-Mol introduces a Gaussian cross-entropy loss function tailored for regression tasks, enabling superior performance across multiple downstream applications. The model surpasses existing methods, improving molecular conformation generation by over 10% and 20% across two datasets, while outperforming token-only models by 30% in property prediction. In pocket-based molecular generation, it enhances drug-likeness and synthetic accessibility by approximately 11% and 14%, respectively. Notably, Token-Mol operates 35 times faster than expert diffusion models. In real-world validation, it improves success rates and, when combined with reinforcement learning, further optimizes affinity and drug-likeness, advancing AI-driven drug discovery. In this work the authors present Token-Mol, a token-only 3D drug design model, which deploys the Gaussian cross-entropy (GCE) loss function for regression tasks. It exhibits superior performance in molecular conformation generation, property prediction, and pocket-based generation, thus opening up new avenues for drug design.
Jike Wang, Rui Qin, Mingyang Wang et al.· Nature Communications· 30 citations· ⚡1
Reaction representation learning is of paramount importance for adopting deep-learning-based chemistry modeling to solve real-world tasks such as synthesis planning. Most prevailing models are prestrained by self-supervised objectives that rely solely on the chemical structure information. Since structurally similar reactions could possess entirely distinct properties (e.g., reaction yields) and the synthesis-related tasks are highly heterogeneous, there are inherent limitations in constructing a foundational reaction model within the existing approaches. To tackle this limitation, we propose HiCLR, a knowledge-induced hierarchical contrastive learning framework for chemical reactions, by introducing relational inductive bias to forge chemically meaningful and generally applicable reaction fingerprints. Critically, the pretraining scheme combining both retrosynthesis prediction and contrastive loss enables HiCLR to tackle generation-based and understanding-based tasks simultaneously. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that HiCLR successfully organizes the reaction space into hierarchical global semantic clusters, aligned well with prior knowledge. Consequently, HiCLR is the first foundation model that can be broadly applied to various synthesis-related tasks, and it achieves state-of-the-art performance in reaction classification, reaction condition recommendation, reaction yield prediction, synthesis planning, and even molecular property prediction. HiCLR demonstrates clear benefits in incorporating domain knowledge to guide the learning of neural networks, expediting AI-driven advancements in chemistry.
Jialu Wu, Yiheng Zhu, Xiaorui Wang et al.· JACS Au· 0 citations
The discovery of CAP-Gly domain-containing linker protein 1(CLIP1)-Leukocyte tyrosine kinase (LTK) as an oncogenic fusion reveals a unique dependency not only on LTK kinase activity but also on CLIP1-mediated multimerization, a noncatalytic function that drives oncogenic signaling. While this fusion is currently targeted with anaplastic lymphoma kinase inhibitors, their exclusive focus on kinase inhibition leaves the scaffolding function intact, necessitating a complete protein clearance strategy. Here, we report the AI-guided development of a first-in-class proteolysis-targeting chimera (PROTAC) designed to selectively degrade the CLIP1-LTK fusion protein. By integrating deep learning models for ternary complex prediction with structure-based molecular optimization, we designed DCL05, an orally bioavailable degrader of CLIP1-LTK fusion protein, achieving picomolar degradation potency (DC50 = 40 pM) and robust antitumor activity. DCL05 consistently outperformed existing kinase inhibitors across a broad spectrum of LTK resistance-associated mutations, both in vitro and in vivo. Collectively, our study explores resistance-associated contexts of LTK and establishes a structure-guided PROTAC development pipeline, providing a promising therapeutic strategy for overcoming acquired resistance in kinase-driven cancers.
Shicheng Chen, Haiting Duan, S. Zhong et al.· Proceedings of the National...· 0 citations
Enzymatic reactions play an emerging role in a broad spectrum of scientific and industrial applications. The inherent complexity of enzymes, such as their substrate specificity, conformational flexibility, and the vast diversity of reactions involved, poses substantial challenges for the advanced computational prediction of enzymatic reactions with desirable accuracy. Moreover, existing approaches are mostly tailored for a specific sub-task, such as substrate prediction or binding site annotation, which limits their applicability. In this study, we introduce ERAM, a task-agnostic multimodal learning framework capable of addressing a broad range of downstream applications with both accuracy and efficiency. ERAM aligns pre-trained molecular representations from Protein Language Model with the knowledge of enzyme catalysis by modeling enzymatic reactions as multi-relational data. In enzyme retrieval tasks, ERAM achieves an improvement of 28.31% in mean average precision compared with the state-of-the-art (SOTA) method, CREEP. In substrate prediction tasks, ERAM outperforms the SOTA method ESP, achieving average improvements of 35.53% and 22.97% in Matthews correlation coefficient across two datasets. Additionally, ERAM exhibits commendable interpretability by assigning higher attention weights to binding sites, resulting in lower false-positive rates (42.36%) and higher overlap scores (70.59%) in the unsupervised binding site prediction task compared to RXNAA Mapper. By learning embeddings of substrates, enzymes, and products within a unified knowledge graph latent space, ERAM demonstrates its potential as a versatile and effective tool for enzyme catalysis research.
Multi-target drugs hold great promise for treating complex diseases, yet existing methodologies predominantly rely on ligand-based approaches, which lack sufficient biological context and are often confined to specific target pairs, resulting in limited generalizability. Here, we introduce LaMGen, a general-purpose multi-target drug design framework powered by large language models (LLMs). Built on MTD2025, a dataset comprising over 600,000 quantum-accurate molecular conformations and 700,000 multi-target associations, LaMGen directly yields energy-favorable conformations with quantum-level accuracy. The framework integrates ESM-C protein embeddings, rotation-aware ligand tokens, and a TriCoupleAttention module to capture multi-level target–ligand interactions. Across independent benchmarks, LaMGen outperforms diffusion-based model across multiple properties, generating molecules in an average of 0.44 s, while preserving high conformational plausibility. Retrospective analyses demonstrate that LaMGen not only can reproduce molecules identical to known actives, but also consistently produces structurally novel candidates with conserved core scaffolds and superior binding affinities. Designing effective multi-target therapeutics remains a major challenge, as existing ligand- or protein-centric methods struggle to generate biologically contextualized, spatially valid 3D molecules, particularly for triple-target systems. This study introduces LaMGen, an LLM-powered framework that leverages large-scale protein-ligand data and rotation-aware molecular encoding to rapidly produce chemically plausible multi-target candidates, achieving strong zero-shot generalization, superior molecular quality, and robust performance across dual- and triple-target design tasks.
Qun Su, Qiaolin Gou, Hui Zhang et al.· Nature Communications· 1 citation
Accurate prediction of blood-brain barrier permeability (BBBP) is essential for central nervous system drug discovery, yet existing models are often limited by their reliance on predefined physicochemical descriptors, small-molecule-centered training sets, or conformation-dependent representations, which restricts their transferability across chemically diverse modalities especially peptides. In addition, publicly available BBBP datasets remain fragmented, inconsistently standardized, and weakly controlled for molecular redundancy, increasing the risk of data leakage and overestimated model performance. In this study, we propose BBBP-Atlas, a structure-aware BBB permeability prediction model designed for unified modeling of small molecules and peptides with the first cross-modal dataset OmniBBBP. Designed to bypass descriptor and conformation dependencies, our model represents standardized molecular structures as atom-level graphs to capture local atom-bond environments and long-range topological dependencies associated with BBB transport. This design enables direct learning of structure-permeability relationships from molecular topology. For model training and evaluation, we curated a cross-modal, redundancy-filtered database OmniBBBP that seamlessly unifies small molecules and complex peptides, containing 10,218 unique compounds with 9,316 small molecules and 902 peptides. BBBP-Atlas achieved an accuracy of 0.8914 and an MCC of 0.7678 on the independent test set. On a balanced external benchmark of 200 compounds, our model reached an AUC of 0.9108, an accuracy of 0.8500, and an MCC of 0.7000, outperforming LightBBB by an absolute MCC gain of 6%. Case studies further showed that BBBP-Atlas captured clinically meaningful BBB permeability patterns, correctly identifying lorlatinib as BBB-permeable and vancomycin as BBB-impermeable with high confidence. The OmniBBBP-backed BBBP-Atlas offers a versatile and cross-modal approach for single-compound prediction, batch screening, and dataset exploration for CNS drug discovery. BBBP-Atlas is available at https://cadd.drugflow.com/bbbp/.
Xin Shen, Qun Su, Hao Luo et al.· bioRxiv· 0 citations
ProphDR is an interpretable deep learning framework that integrates multiomics data and drug structural information using a hierarchical attention mechanism, and generates biologically interpretable attention maps that highlight key pharmacophores and resistance-related genes consistent with established mechanisms in NSCLC and BRCA.
Yundian Zeng, Qing Ye, Jike Wang et al.· Journal of Chemical Informat...· 0 citations
The first comprehensive benchmarking framework specifically designed to accommodate inter-dataset heterogeneity is presented, finding that well-designed small datasets can match or even surpass the performance of larger benchmarks, suggesting that different metrics are applicable to different datasets/testing scenarios.
Yingjuan Cheng, Qing Ye, Linlong Jiang et al.· Journal of Cheminformatics· 0 citations