Predicting the structure of unexplored novel fentanyl analogues by deep learning model

Fentanyl and its analogues are psychoactive substances and the concern of fentanyl abuse has been existed in decades. Because the structure of fentanyl is easy to be modified, criminals may synthesize new fentanyl analogues to avoid supervision. The drug supervision is based on the structure matching to the database and too few kinds of fentanyl analogues are included in the database, so it is necessary to find out more potential fentanyl analogues and expand the sample space of fentanyl analogues. In this study, we introduced two deep generative models (SeqGAN and MolGPT) to generate potential fentanyl analogues, and a total of 11 041 valid molecules were obtained. The results showed that not only can we generate molecules with similar property distribution of original data, but the generated molecules also contain potential fentanyl analogues that are not pretty similar to any of original data. Ten molecules based on the rules of fentanyl analogues were selected for NMR, MS and IR validation. The results indicated that these molecules are all unreported fentanyl analogues. Furthermore, this study is the first to apply the deep learning to the generation of fentanyl analogues, greatly expands the exploring space of fentanyl analogues and provides help for the supervision of fentanyl.