ADME-drug-likeness: enriching molecular foundation models via pharmacokinetics-guided multi-task learning for...

Recent breakthroughs in AI-driven generative models enable the rapid design of extensive molecular libraries, creating an urgent need for fast and accurate drug-likeness evaluation. Traditional approaches, however, rely heavily on structural descriptors and overlook pharmacokinetic (PK) factors such as absorption, distribution, metabolism, and excretion (ADME). Furthermore, existing deep-learning models neglect the complex interdependencies among ADME tasks, which play a pivotal role in determining clinical viability. We introduce ADME-DL (drug likeness), a novel two-step pipeline that first enhances diverse range of molecular foundation models (MFMs) via sequential ADME multi-task learning. By enforcing an A→D→M→E flow-grounded in a data-driven task dependency analysis that aligns with established PK principles-our method more accurately encodes PK information into the learned embedding space. In Step 2, the resulting ADME-informed embeddings are leveraged for drug-likeness classification, distinguishing approved drugs from negative sets drawn from chemical libraries. Through comprehensive experiments, our sequential ADME multi-task learning achieves up to +2.4% improvement over state-of-the-art baselines, and enhancing performance across tested MFMs by up to +18.2%. Case studies with clinically annotated drugs validate that respecting the PK hierarchy produces more relevant predictions, reflecting drug discovery phases. These findings underscore the potential of ADME-DL to significantly enhance the early-stage filtering of candidate molecules, bridging the gap between purely structural screening methods and PK-aware modeling.

The source code for ADME-DL is available at https://github.com/eugenebang/ADME-DL.