3D-SMGE: a pipeline for scaffold-based molecular generation and evaluation

In the process of drug discovery, one of the key problems is how to improve the biological activity and ADMET properties starting from a specific structure, which is also called structural optimization. Based on a starting scaffold, the use of deep generative model to generate molecules with desired drug-like properties will provide a powerful tool to accelerate the structural optimization process. However, the existing generative models remain challenging in extracting molecular features efficiently in 3D space to generate drug-like 3D molecules. Moreover, most of the existing ADMET prediction models made predictions of different properties through a single model, which can result in reduced prediction accuracy on some datasets. To effectively generate molecules from a specific scaffold and provide basis for the structural optimization, the 3D-SMGE (3-Dimensional Scaffold-based Molecular Generation and Evaluation) work consisting of molecular generation and prediction of ADMET properties is presented. For the molecular generation, we proposed 3D-SMG, a novel deep generative model for the end-to-end design of 3D molecules. In the 3D-SMG model, we designed the cross-aggregated continuous-filter convolution (ca-cfconv), which is used to achieve efficient and low-cost 3D spatial feature extraction while ensuring the invariance of atomic space rotation. 3D-SMG was proved to generate valid, unique and novel molecules with high drug-likeness. Besides, the proposed data-adaptive multi-model ADMET prediction method outperformed or maintained the best evaluation metrics on 24 out of 27 ADMET benchmark datasets. 3D-SMGE is anticipated to emerge as a powerful tool for hit-to-lead structural optimizations and accelerate the drug discovery process.