The DOI matches its Crossref record; 9 of the 9 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.
Molecular de-novo design through deep reinforcement learning
Open accessAbstract
This work introduces a method to tune a sequence-based generative model for molecular de novo design that through augmented episodic likelihood can learn to generate structures with certain specified desirable properties. We demonstrate how this model can execute a range of tasks such as generating analogues to a query structure and generating compounds predicted to be active against a biological target. As a proof of principle, the model is first trained to generate molecules that do not contain sulphur. As a second example, the model is trained to generate analogues to the drug Celecoxib, a technique that could be used for scaffold hopping or library expansion starting from a single molecule. Finally, when tuning the model towards generating compounds predicted to be active against the dopamine receptor type 2, the model generates structures of which more than 95% are predicted to be active, including experimentally confirmed actives that have not been included in either the generative model nor the activity prediction model. Graphical abstract .
Overview
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
Verification
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.
Self-check
Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.
The self-check needs the paper’s full text.
Citations
Cites
Hochreiter, S., & Schmidhuber, J. (1997) · Neural Computation · doi:10.1162/neco.1997.9.8.1735 · Cited by 102,318
Reinforcement Learning: An Introduction
Sutton, R. S., & Barto, A. G. (1998) · IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks · doi:10.1109/tnn.1998.712192 · Cited by 27,225
Mastering the game of Go with deep neural networks and tree search
Silver, D., Huang, A., Maddison, C. J., Guez, A., Sifre, L., van den Driessche, G., Schrittwieser, J., Antonoglou, I., Panneershelvam, V., Lanctot, M., et al. (2016) · Nature · doi:10.1038/nature16961 · Cited by 15,612
Recurrent neural network based language model
Mikolov, T., Karafiát, M., Burget, L., Černocký, J., & Khudanpur, S. (2010) · Interspeech 2010 · doi:10.21437/interspeech.2010-343 · Cited by 5,390
ChEMBL: a large-scale bioactivity database for drug discovery
Gaulton, A., Bellis, L. J., Bento, A. P., Chambers, J., Davies, M., Hersey, A., Light, Y., McGlinchey, S., Michalovich, D., Al-Lazikani, B., et al. (2012) · Nucleic Acids Research · doi:10.1093/nar/gkr777 · Cited by 4,382
Automatic Chemical Design Using a Data-Driven Continuous Representation of Molecules
Gómez-Bombarelli, R., Wei, J. N., Duvenaud, D., Hernández-Lobato, J. M., Sánchez-Lengeling, B., Sheberla, D., Aguilera-Iparraguirre, J., Hirzel, T. D., Adams, R. P., & Aspuru-Guzik, A. (2018) · ACS Central Science · doi:10.1021/acscentsci.7b00572 · Cited by 3,106
DeepTox: toxicity prediction using deep learning
Mayr, A., Klambauer, G., Unterthiner, T., & Hochreiter, S. (2016) · Frontiers in Environmental Science · doi:10.3389/fenvs.2015.00080 · Cited by 1,081
Automated design of ligands to polypharmacological profiles
Besnard, J., Ruda, G. F., Setola, V., Abecassis, K., Rodriguiz, R. M., Huang, X.-P., Norval, S., Sassano, M. F., Shin, A. I., Webster, L. A., et al. (2012) · Nature · doi:10.1038/nature11691 · Cited by 832
DOGS: Reaction-Driven de novo Design of Bioactive Compounds
Hartenfeller, M., Zettl, H., Walter, M., Rupp, M., Reisen, F., Proschak, E., Weggen, S., Stark, H., & Schneider, G. (2012) · PLoS Computational Biology · doi:10.1371/journal.pcbi.1002380 · Cited by 251 · cited 1×
“In contrast, the ligand based approach is to generate a large virtual library of chemical structures, and search this chemical space using a scoring function that typically takes into account several properties such as DMPK profiles, synthetic accessibility, bioactivity, and query structure similarity [4, 5].”
Background
Cited by
Applications of machine learning in drug discovery and development
Vamathevan, J., Clark, D., Czodrowski, P., Dunham, I., Ferran, E., Lee, G., Li, B., Madabhushi, A., Shah, P., Spitzer, M., et al. (2019) · Nature Reviews Drug Discovery · doi:10.1038/s41573-019-0024-5 · Cited by 3,228
Opportunities and obstacles for deep learning in biology and medicine
Ching, T., Himmelstein, D. S., Beaulieu-Jones, B. K., Kalinin, A. A., Do, B. T., Way, G. P., Ferrero, E., Agapow, P.-M., Zietz, M., Hoffman, M. M., et al. (2018) · Journal of The Royal Society Interface · doi:10.1098/rsif.2017.0387 · Cited by 2,310
The rise of deep learning in drug discovery
Chen, H., Engkvist, O., Wang, Y., Olivecrona, M., & Blaschke, T. (2018) · Drug Discovery Today · doi:10.1016/j.drudis.2018.01.039 · Cited by 1,770
Self-citationArtificial intelligence to deep learning: machine intelligence approach for drug discovery
Gupta, R., Srivastava, D., Sahu, M., Tiwari, S., Ambasta, R. K., & Kumar, P. (2021) · Molecular Diversity · doi:10.1007/s11030-021-10217-3 · Cited by 1,473
“A similar methodology was likewise effectively utilized for the development of novel peptide structures [430].”
MethodRecent advances and applications of deep learning methods in materials science
Choudhary, K., DeCost, B., Chen, C., Jain, A., Tavazza, F., Cohn, R., Park, C. W., Choudhary, A., Agrawal, A., Billinge, S. J. L., et al. (2022) · npj Computational Materials · doi:10.1038/s41524-022-00734-6 · Cited by 1,172
“There have also been several applications for identifying reasonable chemical space using DL methods such as autoenco-ders 111 and reinforcement learning 112 – 114 for inverse materials design.”
MethodMachine learning in chemoinformatics and drug discovery
Lo, Y.-C., Rensi, S. E., Torng, W., & Altman, R. B. (2018) · Drug Discovery Today · doi:10.1016/j.drudis.2018.05.010 · Cited by 960
GuacaMol: Benchmarking Models for de Novo Molecular Design
Brown, N., Fiscato, M., Segler, M. H. S., & Vaucher, A. C. (2019) · Journal of Chemical Information and Modeling · doi:10.1021/acs.jcim.8b00839 · Cited by 895
Molecular Sets (MOSES): A Benchmarking Platform for Molecular Generation Models
Polykovskiy, D., Zhebrak, A., Sanchez-Lengeling, B., Golovanov, S., Tatanov, O., Belyaev, S., Kurbanov, R., Artamonov, A., Aladinskiy, V., Veselov, M., et al. (2020) · Frontiers in Pharmacology · doi:10.3389/fphar.2020.565644 · Cited by 849
Self-citationArtificial Intelligence in Cancer Research and Precision Medicine
Bhinder, B., Gilvary, C., Madhukar, N. S., & Elemento, O. (2021) · Cancer Discovery · doi:10.1158/2159-8290.cd-21-0090 · Cited by 781
Self-Driving Laboratories for Chemistry and Materials Science
Tom, G., Schmid, S. P., Baird, S. G., Cao, Y., Darvish, K., Hao, H., Lo, S., Pablo-García, S., Rajaonson, E. M., Skreta, M., et al. (2024) · Chemical Reviews · doi:10.1021/acs.chemrev.4c00055 · Cited by 707
Deep learning for molecular design—a review of the state of the art
Elton, D. C., Boukouvalas, Z., Fuge, M. D., & Chung, P. W. (2019) · Molecular Systems Design & Engineering · doi:10.1039/c9me00039a · Cited by 683
Advancing drug discovery via artificial intelligence
Chan, H. C. S., Shan, H., Dahoun, T., Vogel, H., & Yuan, S. (2019) · Trends in Pharmacological Sciences · doi:10.1016/j.tips.2019.06.004 · Cited by 654
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
Mater, A. C., & Coote, M. L. (2019) · Journal of Chemical Information and Modeling · doi:10.1021/acs.jcim.9b00266 · Cited by 565
REINVENT 2.0: An AI Tool for De Novo Drug Design
Blaschke, T., Arús-Pous, J., Chen, H., Margreitter, C., Tyrchan, C., Engkvist, O., Papadopoulos, K., & Patronov, A. (2020) · Journal of Chemical Information and Modeling · doi:10.1021/acs.jcim.0c00915 · Cited by 496
Self-citationArtificial intelligence in drug discovery: recent advances and future perspectives
Jiménez-Luna, J., Grisoni, F., Weskamp, N., & Schneider, G. (2021) · Expert Opinion on Drug Discovery · doi:10.1080/17460441.2021.1909567 · Cited by 464
Vatansever, S., Schlessinger, A., Wacker, D., Kaniskan, H. Ü., Jin, J., Zhou, M., & Zhang, B. (2021) · Medicinal Research Reviews · doi:10.1002/med.21764 · Cited by 429
Molecular generative model based on conditional variational autoencoder for de novo molecular design
Lim, J., Ryu, S., Kim, J. W., & Kim, W. Y. (2018) · Journal of Cheminformatics · doi:10.1186/s13321-018-0286-7 · Cited by 421
Application of Generative Autoencoder in De Novo Molecular Design
Blaschke, T., Olivecrona, M., Engkvist, O., Bajorath, J., & Chen, H. (2018) · Molecular Informatics · doi:10.1002/minf.201700123 · Cited by 411
Self-citationDe Novo Design of Bioactive Small Molecules by Artificial Intelligence
Merk, D., Friedrich, L., Grisoni, F., & Schneider, G. (2018) · Molecular Informatics · doi:10.1002/minf.201700153 · Cited by 373
Deep learning in drug discovery: opportunities, challenges and future prospects
Lavecchia, A. (2019) · Drug Discovery Today · doi:10.1016/j.drudis.2019.07.006 · Cited by 353
Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning Technology Driven Modern Drug Discovery and Development
Sarkar, C., Das, B., Rawat, V. S., Wahlang, J. B., Nongpiur, A., Tiewsoh, I., Lyngdoh, N. M., Das, D., Bidarolli, M., & Sony, H. T. (2023) · International Journal of Molecular Sciences · doi:10.3390/ijms24032026 · Cited by 347
AI in drug discovery and its clinical relevance
Qureshi, R., Irfan, M., Gondal, T. M., Khan, S., Wu, J., Hadi, M. U., Heymach, J., Le, X., Yan, H., & Alam, T. (2023) · Heliyon · doi:10.1016/j.heliyon.2023.e17575 · Cited by 319
Entangled Conditional Adversarial Autoencoder for de Novo Drug Discovery
Polykovskiy, D., Zhebrak, A., Vetrov, D., Ivanenkov, Y., Aladinskiy, V., Mamoshina, P., Bozdaganyan, M., Aliper, A., Zhavoronkov, A., & Kadurin, A. (2018) · Molecular Pharmaceutics · doi:10.1021/acs.molpharmaceut.8b00839 · Cited by 278
A review of large language models and autonomous agents in chemistry
Ramos, M. C., Collison, C. J., & White, A. D. (2025) · Chemical Science · doi:10.1039/d4sc03921a · Cited by 274
Mol-CycleGAN: a generative model for molecular optimization
Maziarka, Ł., Pocha, A., Kaczmarczyk, J., Rataj, K., Danel, T., & Warchoł, M. (2020) · Journal of Cheminformatics · doi:10.1186/s13321-019-0404-1 · Cited by 275
The transformational role of GPU computing and deep learning in drug discovery
Pandey, M., Fernandez, M., Gentile, F., Isayev, O., Tropsha, A., Stern, A. C., & Cherkasov, A. (2022) · Nature Machine Intelligence · doi:10.1038/s42256-022-00463-x · Cited by 255
Shape-Based Generative Modeling for de Novo Drug Design
Skalic, M., Jiménez, J., Sabbadin, D., & De Fabritiis, G. (2019) · Journal of Chemical Information and Modeling · doi:10.1021/acs.jcim.8b00706 · Cited by 229
Accelerating antibiotic discovery through artificial intelligence
Melo, M. C. R., Maasch, J. R. M. A., & de la Fuente-Nunez, C. (2021) · Communications Biology · doi:10.1038/s42003-021-02586-0 · Cited by 234
Generative molecular design in low data regimes
Moret, M., Friedrich, L., Grisoni, F., Merk, D., & Schneider, G. (2020) · Nature Machine Intelligence · doi:10.1038/s42256-020-0160-y · Cited by 219
MSNovelist: de novo structure generation from mass spectra
Stravs, M. A., Dührkop, K., Böcker, S., & Zamboni, N. (2022) · Nature Methods · doi:10.1038/s41592-022-01486-3 · Cited by 226
Unleashing the power of generative AI in drug discovery
Gangwal, A., & Lavecchia, A. (2024) · Drug Discovery Today · doi:10.1016/j.drudis.2024.103992 · Cited by 195
Combining generative artificial intelligence and on-chip synthesis for de novo drug design
Grisoni, F., Huisman, B. J. H., Button, A. L., Moret, M., Atz, K., Merk, D., & Schneider, G. (2021) · Science Advances · doi:10.1126/sciadv.abg3338 · Cited by 190
Generative machine learning for de novo drug discovery: A systematic review
Martinelli, D. D. (2022) · Computers in Biology and Medicine · doi:10.1016/j.compbiomed.2022.105403 · Cited by 177
Artificial intelligence in chemistry and drug design
Brown, N., Ertl, P., Lewis, R., Luksch, T., Reker, D., & Schneider, N. (2020) · Journal of Computer-Aided Molecular Design · doi:10.1007/s10822-020-00317-x · Cited by 165
Looking beyond the hype: applied AI and machine learning in translational medicine
Toh, T. S., Dondelinger, F., & Wang, D. (2019) · EBioMedicine · doi:10.1016/j.ebiom.2019.08.027 · Cited by 159
The Advent of Generative Chemistry
Vanhaelen, Q., Lin, Y.-C., & Zhavoronkov, A. (2020) · ACS Medicinal Chemistry Letters · doi:10.1021/acsmedchemlett.0c00088 · Cited by 151
De Novo Design of New Chemical Entities for SARS-CoV-2 Using Artificial Intelligence
Bung, N., Krishnan, S. R., Bulusu, G., & Roy, A. (2021) · Future Medicinal Chemistry · doi:10.4155/fmc-2020-0262 · Cited by 118
Autonomous Molecular Design: Then and Now
Dimitrov, T., Kreisbeck, C., Becker, J. S., Aspuru-Guzik, A., & Saikin, S. K. (2019) · ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces · doi:10.1021/acsami.9b01226 · Cited by 103
Link-INVENT: Generative Linker Design with Reinforcement Learning
Guo, J., Knuth, F., Margreitter, C., Janet, J. P., Papadopoulos, K., Engkvist, O., & Patronov, A. (2022) · doi:10.26434/chemrxiv-2022-qkx9f · Cited by 101
Self-citationXu, M., Ran, T., & Chen, H. (2021) · Journal of Chemical Information and Modeling · doi:10.1021/acs.jcim.0c01494 · Cited by 85
Self-citationArtificial intelligence for drug discovery and development in Alzheimer's disease
Qiu, Y., & Cheng, F. (2024) · Current Opinion in Structural Biology · doi:10.1016/j.sbi.2024.102776 · Cited by 83
Discovering small-molecule senolytics with deep neural networks
Wong, F., Omori, S., Donghia, N. M., Zheng, E. J., & Collins, J. J. (2023) · Nature Aging · doi:10.1038/s43587-023-00415-z · Cited by 82
Artificial intelligence facilitates drug design in the big data era
Wang, L., Ding, J., Pan, L., Cao, D., Jiang, H., & Ding, X. (2019) · Chemometrics and Intelligent Laboratory Systems · doi:10.1016/j.chemolab.2019.103850 · Cited by 80
Thomas, M., Smith, R. T., O’Boyle, N. M., de Graaf, C., & Bender, A. (2021) · Journal of Cheminformatics · doi:10.1186/s13321-021-00516-0 · Cited by 78
“using reinforcement learning [7, 8, 20, 21], Bayesian optimization [22] or particle swarm optimization [23].”
BackgroundMethodInfluentialVerkhivker, G. M., Agajanian, S., Hu, G., & Tao, P. (2020) · Frontiers in Molecular Biosciences · doi:10.3389/fmolb.2020.00136 · Cited by 76
Protein design via deep learning
Ding, W., Nakai, K., & Gong, H. (2022) · Briefings in Bioinformatics · doi:10.1093/bib/bbac102 · Cited by 66
Deep learning for low-data drug discovery: Hurdles and opportunities
van Tilborg, D., Brinkmann, H., Criscuolo, E., Rossen, L., Özçelik, R., & Grisoni, F. (2024) · Current Opinion in Structural Biology · doi:10.1016/j.sbi.2024.102818 · Cited by 61
Niazi, S. K. (2025) · Pharmaceuticals · doi:10.3390/ph18091271 · Cited by 61
Xu, X., Xu, T., Zhou, J., Liao, X., Zhang, R., Wang, Y., Zhang, L., & Gao, X. (2023) · Genomics, Proteomics & Bioinformatics · doi:10.1016/j.gpb.2023.03.004 · Cited by 32
Retro Drug Design: From Target Properties to Molecular Structures
Wang, Y., Michael, S., Yang, S.-M., Huang, R., Cruz-Gutierrez, K., Zhang, Y., Zhao, J., Xia, M., Shinn, P., & Sun, H. (2022) · Journal of Chemical Information and Modeling · doi:10.1021/acs.jcim.2c00123 · Cited by 24
Can Generative-Model-Based Drug Design Become a New Normal in Drug Discovery?
Chen, H. (2022) · Journal of Medicinal Chemistry · doi:10.1021/acs.jmedchem.1c02042 · Cited by 21
Self-citationSako, M., Yasuo, N., & Sekijima, M. (2025) · Journal of Chemical Information and Modeling · doi:10.1021/acs.jcim.4c01385 · Cited by 21
GenSMILES: An enhanced validity conscious representation for inverse design of molecules
Bhadwal, A. S., Kumar, K., & Kumar, N. (2023) · Knowledge-Based Systems · doi:10.1016/j.knosys.2023.110429 · Cited by 17
FEP Protocol Builder: Optimization of Free Energy Perturbation Protocols Using Active Learning
de Oliveira, C., Leswing, K., Feng, S., Kanters, R., Abel, R., & Bhat, S. (2023) · Journal of Chemical Information and Modeling · doi:10.1021/acs.jcim.3c00681 · Cited by 15
Hadfield, T. E., Scantlebury, J., & Deane, C. M. (2023) · Journal of Cheminformatics · doi:10.1186/s13321-023-00755-3 · Cited by 9
PCF-VAE: posterior collapse free variational autoencoder for de novo drug design
Bhadwal, A. S., Kumari, M., & Kumar, A. (2025) · Scientific Reports · doi:10.1038/s41598-025-14285-5 · Cited by 7
“Reinforcement learning approaches are employed to adapt pre-trained generative models 20–22 .”
Sequence Modeling of Temporal Credit Assignment for Episodic Reinforcement Learning
Liu, Y., Luo, Y., Zhong, Y., Chen, X., Liu, Q., & Peng, J. (2019) · arXiv · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1905.13420
Metadata
- Authors
- Olivecrona, M., Blaschke, T., Engkvist, O., & Chen, H.
- Venue
- Journal of Cheminformatics
- Published
- 2017-09-04
- Volume
- 9
- Issue
- 1
- Pages
- 48-48
- ISSN
- 1758-2946 (ISSN-L)
- OpenAlex
- W2610148085
- Cited by
- 1,324
- References
- 9
- FWCI
- 56.24
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- gold
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
Data sources
Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.
Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).
Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.