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Title: Automatic Chemical Design Using a Data-Driven Continuous Representation of Molecules

Abstract

We report a method to convert discrete representations of molecules to and from a multidimensional continuous representation. This model allows us to generate new molecules for efficient exploration and optimization through open-ended spaces of chemical compounds. A deep neural network was trained on hundreds of thousands of existing chemical structures to construct three coupled functions: an encoder, a decoder, and a predictor. The encoder converts the discrete representation of a molecule into a real-valued continuous vector, and the decoder converts these continuous vectors back to discrete molecular representations. The predictor estimates chemical properties from the latent continuous vector representation of the molecule. Continuous representations of molecules allow us to automatically generate novel chemical structures by performing simple operations in the latent space, such as decoding random vectors, perturbing known chemical structures, or interpolating between molecules. Continuous representations also allow the use of powerful gradient-based optimization to efficiently guide the search for optimized functional compounds. We demonstrate our method in the domain of drug-like molecules and also in a set of molecules with fewer that nine heavy atoms.

Authors:
ORCiD logo [1]; ORCiD logo [2];  [3];  [4];  [2]; ORCiD logo [2];  [1];  [1];  [5]; ORCiD logo [6]
+ Show Author Affiliations
  1. Kyulux North America Inc., Boston, MA (United States)
  2. Harvard Univ., Cambridge, MA (United States)
  3. Univ. of Toronto, ON (Canada)
  4. Univ. of Cambridge (United Kingdom)
  5. Google Brain, Mountain View, CA (United States); Princeton Univ., NJ (United States)
  6. Harvard Univ., Cambridge, MA (United States); Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR), Toronto, ON (United States)
Publication Date:
Research Org.:
Harvard Univ., Cambridge, MA (United States); Univ. of Toronto, ON (Canada)
Sponsoring Org.:
USDOE Office of Science (SC), Basic Energy Sciences (BES) (SC-22)
OSTI Identifier:
1416858
Alternate Identifier(s):
OSTI ID: 1498675
Grant/Contract Number:  
SC0015959
Resource Type:
Journal Article: Published Article
Journal Name:
ACS Central Science
Additional Journal Information:
Journal Volume: 4; Journal Issue: 2; Journal ID: ISSN 2374-7943
Publisher:
American Chemical Society (ACS)
Country of Publication:
United States
Language:
English
Subject:
37 INORGANIC, ORGANIC, PHYSICAL, AND ANALYTICAL CHEMISTRY

Citation Formats

Gómez-Bombarelli, Rafael, Wei, Jennifer N., Duvenaud, David, Hernández-Lobato, José Miguel, Sánchez-Lengeling, Benjamín, Sheberla, Dennis, Aguilera-Iparraguirre, Jorge, Hirzel, Timothy D., Adams, Ryan P., and Aspuru-Guzik, Alán. Automatic Chemical Design Using a Data-Driven Continuous Representation of Molecules. United States: N. p., 2018. Web. doi:10.1021/acscentsci.7b00572.
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Gómez-Bombarelli, Rafael, Wei, Jennifer N., Duvenaud, David, Hernández-Lobato, José Miguel, Sánchez-Lengeling, Benjamín, Sheberla, Dennis, Aguilera-Iparraguirre, Jorge, Hirzel, Timothy D., Adams, Ryan P., & Aspuru-Guzik, Alán. Automatic Chemical Design Using a Data-Driven Continuous Representation of Molecules. United States. doi:10.1021/acscentsci.7b00572.
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Gómez-Bombarelli, Rafael, Wei, Jennifer N., Duvenaud, David, Hernández-Lobato, José Miguel, Sánchez-Lengeling, Benjamín, Sheberla, Dennis, Aguilera-Iparraguirre, Jorge, Hirzel, Timothy D., Adams, Ryan P., and Aspuru-Guzik, Alán. Fri . "Automatic Chemical Design Using a Data-Driven Continuous Representation of Molecules". United States. doi:10.1021/acscentsci.7b00572.
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@article{osti_1416858,
title = {Automatic Chemical Design Using a Data-Driven Continuous Representation of Molecules},
author = {Gómez-Bombarelli, Rafael and Wei, Jennifer N. and Duvenaud, David and Hernández-Lobato, José Miguel and Sánchez-Lengeling, Benjamín and Sheberla, Dennis and Aguilera-Iparraguirre, Jorge and Hirzel, Timothy D. and Adams, Ryan P. and Aspuru-Guzik, Alán},
abstractNote = {We report a method to convert discrete representations of molecules to and from a multidimensional continuous representation. This model allows us to generate new molecules for efficient exploration and optimization through open-ended spaces of chemical compounds. A deep neural network was trained on hundreds of thousands of existing chemical structures to construct three coupled functions: an encoder, a decoder, and a predictor. The encoder converts the discrete representation of a molecule into a real-valued continuous vector, and the decoder converts these continuous vectors back to discrete molecular representations. The predictor estimates chemical properties from the latent continuous vector representation of the molecule. Continuous representations of molecules allow us to automatically generate novel chemical structures by performing simple operations in the latent space, such as decoding random vectors, perturbing known chemical structures, or interpolating between molecules. Continuous representations also allow the use of powerful gradient-based optimization to efficiently guide the search for optimized functional compounds. We demonstrate our method in the domain of drug-like molecules and also in a set of molecules with fewer that nine heavy atoms.},
doi = {10.1021/acscentsci.7b00572},
journal = {ACS Central Science},
issn = {2374-7943},
number = 2,
volume = 4,
place = {United States},
year = {2018},
month = {1}
}
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Journal Article:
Free Publicly Available Full Text
Publisher's Version of Record at 10.1021/acscentsci.7b00572
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Citation Metrics:
Cited by: 85 works
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Figures / Tables:

Figure 1 Figure 1: (a) A diagram of the autoencoder used for molecular design, including the joint property prediction model. Starting from a discrete molecular representation, such as a SMILES string, the encoder network converts each molecule into a vector in the latent space, which is effectively a continuous molecular representation. Givenmore » a point in the latent space, the decoder network produces a corresponding SMILES string. A mutilayer perceptron network estimates the value of target properties associated with each molecule. (b) Gradient-based optimization in continuous latent space. After training a surrogate model f(z) to predict the properties of molecules based on their latent representation z, we can optimize f(z) with respect to z to find new latent representations expected to have high values of desired properties. These new latent representations can then be decoded into SMILES strings, at which point their properties can be tested empirically.« less
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Works referencing / citing this record:

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  • Kumar, Jatin N.; Li, Qianxiao; Jun, Ye
  • MRS Communications, Vol. 9, Issue 02
  • DOI: 10.1557/mrc.2019.54
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