A compact review of molecular property prediction with graph neural networks
Open accessAbstract
As graph neural networks are becoming more and more powerful and useful in the field of drug discovery, many pharmaceutical companies are getting interested in utilizing these methods for their own in-house frameworks. This is especially compelling for tasks such as the prediction of molecular properties which is often one of the most crucial tasks in computer-aided drug discovery workflows. The immense hype surrounding these kinds of algorithms has led to the development of many different types of promising architectures and in this review we try to structure this highly dynamic field of AI-research by collecting and classifying 80 GNNs that have been used to predict more than 20 molecular properties using 48 different datasets.
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Integrity signals
Registry
Cites
Statistics
Claims the paper makes
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Claims other papers make about this one
Each is checked against this paper’s own text: does it say what the citing paper says it does?
Minimizing adverse drug events is part of the drug discovery pipeline.
“Part of the drug discovery pipeline is minimizing adverse drug events [33, 34].”
From Graph representation learning in biomedicine and healthcare (2022) · cites this paper as [34]
Quantifying binding affinity and specificity requires labor- and cost-intensive experiments.
“However, quantifying these metrics requires labor- and cost-intensive experiments [33, 34].”
From Graph representation learning in biomedicine and healthcare (2022) · cites this paper as [34]
Self-check
Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.
The self-check needs the paper’s full text.
Cites
Inductive Representation Learning on Large Graphs
Hamilton, W. L., Ying, R., & Leskovec, J. (2017) · arXiv · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1706.02216 · Cited by 10,639 · see citing works
The graph neural network model
Scarselli, F., Gori, M., Tsoi, A. C., Hagenbuchner, M., & Monfardini, G. (2009) · IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks · doi:10.1109/tnn.2008.2005605 · Cited by 9,582 · see citing works
Modeling Relational Data with Graph Convolutional Networks
Schlichtkrull, M., Kipf, T. N., Bloem, P., van den Berg, R., Titov, I., & Welling, M. (2018) · Lecture Notes in Computer Science · doi:10.1007/978-3-319-93417-4_38 · Cited by 5,570 · see citing works
Neural Message Passing for Quantum ChemistryPreprint
Gilmer, J., Schoenholz, S. S., Riley, P. F., Vinyals, O., & Dahl, G. E. (2017) · arXiv (Cornell University) · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1704.01212 · Cited by 5,414 · see citing works
Targeted Branching for the Maximum Independent Set Problem Using Graph Neural Networks
Silva, G., Rodrigues, M., Teixeira, A., et al. (2024) · DROPS (Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz Center for Informatics) · doi:10.4230/lipics.sea.2024.20 · Cited by 5,266 · see citing works
A Comprehensive Survey on Graph Neural Networks
Wu, Z., Pan, S., Chen, F., Long, G., Zhang, C., & Yu, P. (2020) · UTS ePRESS (University of Technology Sydney) · Cited by 3,174 · see citing works
MoleculeNet: a benchmark for molecular machine learning
Wu, Z., Ramsundar, B., Feinberg, E. N., Gomes, J., Geniesse, C., Pappu, A. S., Leswing, K., & Pande, V. (2018) · Chemical Science · doi:10.1039/c7sc02664a · Cited by 3,107 · see citing works
Recent Trends in Deep Learning Based Natural Language Processing [Review Article]
Young, T., Hazarika, D., Poria, S., & Cambria, E. (2018) · IEEE Computational Intelligence Magazine · doi:10.1109/mci.2018.2840738 · Cited by 2,921 · see citing works
Convolutional Networks on Graphs for Learning Molecular Fingerprints
Duvenaud, D., Maclaurin, D., Aguilera-Iparraguirre, J., Gómez-Bombarelli, R., Hirzel, T., Aspuru-Guzik, A., & Adams, R. P. (2015) · arXiv · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1509.09292 · Cited by 2,628 · see citing works
Learning Convolutional Neural Networks for GraphsPreprint
Niepert, M., Ahmed, M., & Kutzkov, K. (2016) · International Conference on Machine Learning · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1605.05273 · Cited by 2,311 · see citing works
Analyzing Learned Molecular Representations for Property Prediction
Yang, K., Swanson, K., Jin, W., Coley, C., Eiden, P., Gao, H., Guzman-Perez, A., Hopper, T., Kelley, B., Mathea, M., et al. (2019) · Journal of Chemical Information and Modeling · doi:10.1021/acs.jcim.9b00237 · Cited by 1,923 · see citing works
An End-to-End Deep Learning Architecture for Graph Classification
Zhang, M., Cui, Z., Neumann, M., & Chen, Y. (2018) · Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence · doi:10.1609/aaai.v32i1.11782 · Cited by 1,525 · see citing works
Dynamic Edge-Conditioned Filters in Convolutional Neural Networks on Graphs
Simonovsky, M., & Nikos Komodakis, A. (2017) · IEEE Computer Society Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition/Proceedings - IEEE Computer Society Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition/Proceedings · doi:10.1109/cvpr.2017.11 · Cited by 1,346 · see citing works
Deep Convolutional Networks on Graph-Structured Data
Henaff, M., Bruna, J., & LeCun, Y. (2015) · arXiv · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1506.05163 · Cited by 1,255 · see citing works
Adaptive Graph Convolutional Neural Networks
Li, R., Wang, S., Zhu, F., & Huang, J. (2018) · Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence · doi:10.1609/aaai.v32i1.11691 · Cited by 842 · see citing works
Low Data Drug Discovery with One-Shot Learning
Altae-Tran, H., Ramsundar, B., Pappu, A. S., & Pande, V. (2017) · ACS Central Science · doi:10.1021/acscentsci.6b00367 · Cited by 799 · see citing works
Neural Network for Graphs: A Contextual Constructive Approach
Micheli, A. (2009) · IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks · doi:10.1109/tnn.2008.2010350 · Cited by 639 · see citing works
Sun, F.-Y., Hoffmann, J., Verma, V., & Tang, J. (2019) · arXiv (Cornell University) · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1908.01000 · Cited by 604 · see citing works
Large-scale comparison of machine learning methods for drug target prediction on ChEMBL
Mayr, A., Klambauer, G., Unterthiner, T., Steijaert, M., Wegner, J. K., Ceulemans, H., Clevert, D.-A., & Hochreiter, S. (2018) · Chemical Science · doi:10.1039/c8sc00148k · Cited by 584 · see citing works
Improving Graph Neural Network Expressivity via Subgraph Isomorphism Counting
Bouritsas, G., Frasca, F., Zafeiriou, S. P., & Bronstein, M. (2020) · IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence · doi:10.1109/tpami.2022.3154319 · Cited by 579 · see citing works
Lusci, A., Pollastri, G., & Baldi, P. (2013) · Journal of Chemical Information and Modeling · doi:10.1021/ci400187y · Cited by 557 · see citing works
PotentialNet for Molecular Property Prediction
Feinberg, E. N., Sur, D., Wu, Z., Husic, B. E., Mai, H., Li, Y., Sun, S., Yang, J., Ramsundar, B., & Pande, V. S. (2018) · ACS Central Science · doi:10.1021/acscentsci.8b00507 · Cited by 485 · see citing works
Convolutional embedding of attributed molecular graphs for physical property prediction
Coley, C. W., Barzilay, R., Green, W. H., Jaakkola, T. S., & Jensen, K. F. (2017) · Journal of Chemical Information and Modeling · doi:10.1021/acs.jcim.6b00601 · Cited by 470 · see citing works
Graph Convolutional Networks with EigenPooling
Ma, Y., Wang, S., Aggarwal, C. C., & Tang, J. (2019) · ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD) · doi:10.1145/3292500.3330982 · Cited by 347 · see citing works
A Fair Comparison of Graph Neural Networks for Graph ClassificationPreprint
Errica, F., Podda, M., Bacciu, D., & Micheli, A. (2019) · arXiv (Cornell University) · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1912.09893 · Cited by 252 · see citing works
Xu, Y., Pei, J., & Lai, L. (2017) · Journal of Chemical Information and Modeling · doi:10.1021/acs.jcim.7b00244 · Cited by 250 · see citing works
Withnall, M., Lindelöf, E., Engkvist, O., & Chen, H. (2020) · Journal of Cheminformatics · doi:10.1186/s13321-019-0407-y · Cited by 232 · see citing works
Improvement in ADMET Prediction with Multitask Deep Featurization
Feinberg, E. N., Joshi, E., Pande, V. S., & Cheng, A. C. (2020) · Journal of Medicinal Chemistry · doi:10.1021/acs.jmedchem.9b02187 · Cited by 203 · see citing works
LanczosNet: Multi-Scale Deep Graph Convolutional NetworksPreprint
Liao, R., Zhao, Z., Urtasun, R., & Zemel, R. S. (2019) · arXiv (Cornell University) · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1901.01484 · Cited by 186 · see citing works
Zhang, X., & Chen, L. (2018) · International Conference on Learning Representations · Cited by 178 · see citing works
Tang, B., Kramer, S. T., Fang, M., Qiu, Y., Wu, Z., & Xu, D. H. (2020) · Journal of Cheminformatics · doi:10.1186/s13321-020-0414-z · Cited by 163 · see citing works
Molecular Geometry Prediction using a Deep Generative Graph Neural Network
Mansimov, E., Mahmood, O., Kang, S., & Cho, K. (2019) · Scientific Reports · doi:10.1038/s41598-019-56773-5 · Cited by 162 · see citing works
Provably Powerful Graph NetworksPreprint
Maron, H., Ben-Hamu, H., Serviansky, H., & Lipman, Y. (2019) · arXiv (Cornell University) · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1905.11136 · Cited by 149 · see citing works
StructPool: Structured Graph Pooling via Conditional Random Fields
Yuan, H., & Ji, S. (2020) · International Conference on Learning Representations · Cited by 142 · see citing works
Relational Graph Attention NetworksPreprint
Busbridge, D., Sherburn, D., Cavallo, P., & Hammerla, N. (2019) · arXiv (Cornell University) · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1904.05811 · Cited by 140 · see citing works
Molecule Property Prediction Based on Spatial Graph Embedding
Wang, X., Li, Z., Jiang, M., Wang, S., Zhang, S., & Wei, Z. (2019) · Journal of Chemical Information and Modeling · doi:10.1021/acs.jcim.9b00410 · Cited by 119 · see citing works
Automatic Generation of Complementary Descriptors with Molecular Graph Networks
Merkwirth, C., & Lengauer, T. (2005) · Journal of Chemical Information and Modeling · doi:10.1021/ci049613b · Cited by 103 · see citing works
Classical and enriched finite element formulations for Bloch‐periodic boundary conditions
Sukumar, N., & Pask, J. E. (2008) · International Journal for Numerical Methods in Engineering · doi:10.1002/nme.2457 · Cited by 96 · see citing works
Ryu, S., Lim, J., Hong, S. H., & Kim, W. Y. (2018) · arXiv (Cornell University) · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1805.10988 · Cited by 96 · see citing works
Adaptive Graph Convolutional Neural NetworksPreprint
Li, R., Wang, S., Zhu, F., et al. (2018) · arXiv (Cornell University) · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1801.03226 · Cited by 94 · see citing works
Can Graph Neural Networks Count Substructures?Preprint
Chen, Z., Chen, L., Villar, S., & Bruna, J. (2020) · arXiv (Cornell University) · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2002.04025 · Cited by 93 · see citing works
Edge Attention-based Multi-Relational Graph Convolutional NetworksPreprint
Shang, C., Liu, Q., Chen, K., Sun, J., Lü, J., Yi, J., & Bi, J. (2018) · arXiv (Cornell University) · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1802.04944 · Cited by 80 · see citing works
Enhanced Deep‐Learning Prediction of Molecular Properties via Augmentation of Bond Topology
Cho, H., & Choi, I. S. (2019) · ChemMedChem · doi:10.1002/cmdc.201900458 · Cited by 66 · see citing works
Review on Reliable Pattern Recognition with Machine Learning Techniques
Bhamare, D., & Suryawanshi, P. (2018) · Fuzzy Information and Engineering · doi:10.1080/16168658.2019.1611030 · Cited by 65 · see citing works
Learning Graph-Level Representation for Drug DiscoveryPreprint
Li, J., Cai, D., & He, X. (2017) · arXiv (Cornell University) · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1709.03741 · Cited by 62 · see citing works
MoleculeNet: A Benchmark for Molecular Machine LearningPreprint
Wu, Z., Ramsundar, B., Feinberg, E. N., et al. (2017) · arXiv (Cornell University) · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1703.00564 · Cited by 51 · see citing works
Dynamic Edge-Conditioned Filters in Convolutional Neural Networks on Graphs
Simonovsky, M., & Komodakis, N. (2017) · HAL (Le Centre pour la Communication Scientifique Directe) · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1704.02901 · Cited by 50 · see citing works
Are Powerful Graph Neural Nets Necessary? A Dissection on Graph ClassificationPreprint
Chen, T., Bian, S., & Sun, Y. (2019) · arXiv (Cornell University) · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1905.04579 · Cited by 48 · see citing works
ChemNet: A Novel Neural Network Based Method for Graph/Property Mapping
Kireev, D. B. (1995) · Journal of Chemical Information and Computer Sciences · doi:10.1021/ci00024a001 · Cited by 44 · see citing works
Multi-View Graph Neural Networks for Molecular Property PredictionPreprint
Ma, H., Bian, Y., Rong, Y., Huang, W., Xu, T., Xie, W., Ye, G., & Huang, J. (2020) · arXiv (Cornell University) · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2005.13607 · Cited by 36 · see citing works
Pre-training Graph Neural Networks.Preprint
Hu, W., Liu, B., Gomes, J. S., et al. (2019) · arXiv (Cornell University) · Cited by 29 · see citing works
Optimal Transport Graph Neural NetworksPreprint
Chen, B., Bécigneul, G., Ganea, O.-E., et al. (2020) · arXiv (Cornell University) · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2006.04804 · Cited by 21 · see citing works
Effective Training Strategies for Deep Graph Neural Networks.Preprint
Zhou, K., Dong, Y., Lee, W. S., et al. (2020) · arXiv (Cornell University) · Cited by 18 · see citing works
Gated Graph Recursive Neural Networks for Molecular Property PredictionPreprint
Shindo, H., & Matsumoto, Y. (2019) · arXiv (Cornell University) · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1909.00259 · Cited by 12 · see citing works
Graph Nets for Partial Charge PredictionPreprint
Wang, Y., Fass, J., Stern, C., et al. (2019) · arXiv (Cornell University) · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1909.07903 · Cited by 12 · see citing works
Property Prediction of Molecules in Graph Convolutional Neural Network Expansion
Meng, M., Wei, Z., Li, Z., Jiang, M., & Bian, Y. (2019) · IEEE International Conference on Software Engineering and Service Science (ICSESS) · doi:10.1109/icsess47205.2019.9040723 · Cited by 10 · see citing works
Graph Convolutional Networks with EigenPoolingPreprint
Ma, Y., Wang, S., Aggarwal, C. C., et al. (2019) · arXiv (Cornell University) · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1904.13107 · Cited by 9 · see citing works
MxPool: Multiplex Pooling for Hierarchical Graph Representation LearningPreprint
Liang, Y., Zhang, Y., Gao, D., et al. (2020) · arXiv (Cornell University) · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2004.06846 · Cited by 4 · see citing works
Flagged first, then by citations
Research works printed but not linked: 3
- Yang K, Swanson K, Jin W, Coley C, Eiden P, Gao H, et al. Analyzing learned molecular representations for property prediction. J Chem Inform Model 2019;59(8):3370-88. http://dx.doi.org/10.1021/acs.jcim.9b00237. · DOI · Paper page
- Hao Z, Lu C, Huang Z, Wang H, Hu Z, Liu Q, et al. ASGN: an active semi- supervised graph neural network for molecular property prediction; 2007, arXiv:2007.03196v1. · arXiv
- Hu W, Fey M, Zitnik M, Dong Y, Ren H, Liu B, et al. Open graph benchmark: datasets for machine learning on graphs; 2020, arXiv:2005. 00687v4 [cs.LG].
Cited by
Sorted by citations
Graph representation learning in biomedicine and healthcare
Li, M. M., Huang, K., & Zitnik, M. (2022) · Nature Biomedical Engineering · doi:10.1038/s41551-022-00942-x · Cited by 294 · see citing works
“A drug’s binding affinity and specificity to its target determine the drug’s effectiveness and potential for off-target effects 34 .”
InfluentialMachine learning for perturbational single-cell omics
Ji, Y., Lotfollahi, M., Wolf, F. A., & Theis, F. J. (2021) · Cell Systems · doi:10.1016/j.cels.2021.05.016 · Cited by 137 · see citing works
How will generative AI disrupt data science in drug discovery?
Vert, J.-P. (2023) · Nature Biotechnology · doi:10.1038/s41587-023-01789-6 · Cited by 73 · see citing works
Equivariant Graph Neural Networks for Toxicity Prediction
Cremer, J., Medrano Sandonas, L., Tkatchenko, A., Clevert, D.-A., & De Fabritiis, G. (2023) · Chemical Research in Toxicology · doi:10.1021/acs.chemrestox.3c00032 · Cited by 62 · see citing works
Wozniak, S., Janson, G., & Feig, M. (2025) · Journal of Chemical Theory and Computation · doi:10.1021/acs.jctc.4c01682 · Cited by 14 · see citing works
- Authors
- Wieder, O., Kohlbacher, S., Kuenemann, M., Garon, A., Ducrot, P., Seidel, T., & Langer, T.
- Affiliations
- University of Vienna (AT)
- Corresponding author
- Langer, Thierry
- ORCID
- Venue
- Drug Discovery Today: Technologies
- Publisher
- Elsevier BV
- Published
- 2020-12
- Volume
- 37
- Pages
- 1-12
- ISSN
- 1740-6749 (ISSN-L)
- OpenAlex
- W3110901318
- Cited by
- 522
- References
- 58
- Citations by year
- 2026: 83 · 2025: 119 · 2024: 129 · 2023: 100 · 2022: 68 · 2021: 22 · 2019: 1
- FWCI
- 4.22
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- hybrid
- doi.org
- Licence
- Locations
- Drug Discovery Today Technologies (publishedVersion, cc-by-nc-nd)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- Topics
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Computational Theory and Mathematics › Computational Drug Discovery Methods
- Physical Sciences › Materials Science › Materials Chemistry › Machine Learning in Materials Science
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Artificial Intelligence › Advanced Graph Neural Networks
- Keywords
- graph neural networks, molecular property prediction, computational drug discovery
- MeSH terms
- Neural Networks, Computer, Drug Discovery
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.
What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›
Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review