{"title":"GLH2Syn: Global–Local Dual-View Heterogeneous Hypergraph Learning for Drug Synergy Prediction","authors":"Wen Zhang,Yuxuan Tian,Hang Qiu","doi":"10.1021/acs.jcim.6c02413","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1021/acs.jcim.6c02413","url":null,"abstract":"Drug combination therapy has emerged as a promising strategy for improving therapeutic efficacy. While hypergraphs have demonstrated substantial potential for high-order drug synergy modeling, existing approaches still suffer from two critical limitations: (1) reliance on locally determined aggregation limits the utilization of multihop topological context and broader structural information across the hypergraph; (2) homogeneous message passing overlooks the structural heterogeneity of drugs and cell lines within hyperedges. To address these issues, we propose GLH2Syn, a global–local dual-view heterogeneous hypergraph learning framework for drug synergy prediction. Specifically, GLH2Syn operates on a heterogeneous hypergraph in which each drug–drug–cell line triplet forms a hyperedge, incorporating two complementary views: a global diffusion view and a local topology view. The global diffusion view performs diffusion over the node–hyperedge topology to derive globally informed incidence weights, thereby incorporating structural context into local aggregation. The local topology view captures fine-grained structural heterogeneity within hyperedges through structure-aware node-hyperedge propagation, distinguishing the heterogeneous roles of drugs and cell lines in high-order interactions. Furthermore, we design a joint optimization objective integrating drug synergy prediction with similarity reconstruction to preserve both predictive accuracy and biological consistency. Extensive experiments on two public data sets demonstrate that GLH2Syn consistently outperforms 11 competitive baselines on both classification and regression tasks across three test scenarios. Case studies further validate its potential in discovering novel synergistic drug combinations.","PeriodicalId":44,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Chemical Information and Modeling ","volume":"11 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":5.6,"publicationDate":"2026-10-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"149221628","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"化学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Leon Obendorf,Niklas Piet Doering,Petra Knaus,Gerhard Wolber
{"title":"Benchmarking Protein–Ligand Cofolding Models: Correct Ligand Placement Is Decoupled From Accurate Protein Conformation","authors":"Leon Obendorf,Niklas Piet Doering,Petra Knaus,Gerhard Wolber","doi":"10.1021/acs.jcim.6c02169","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1021/acs.jcim.6c02169","url":null,"abstract":"AI-driven cofolding models have become central tools for predicting protein–ligand complexes, yet it remains unclear whether the resulting structures recover the correct protein conformation or merely place the ligand plausibly within an otherwise mispredicted fold. Here, we benchmark four state-of-the-art cofolding models, AlphaFold3, RoseTTAFold3, Boltz-2, and Chai-1, and show that correct ligand placement is systematically decoupled from accurate prediction of the surrounding protein conformation. As test systems, we use kinases and Class A G protein-coupled receptors (GPCRs), families whose pharmacology depends on well-defined conformational states. To enable a prospective assessment, we evaluate complexes released after the training cutoffs of all tested models, together with one earlier nucleotide-bound structure as a control. We find that state-defining structural features, including kinase activation-loop, DFG/DYG geometries, and GPCR intracellular conformations such as ICL3, are frequently mispredicted even when ligand root-mean-square deviation (RMSD) is low. Cofolding adaptively remodels the orthosteric pocket around the bound ligand, but this local adaptation rarely propagates to the correct global conformation. Incorporating state-annotated templates and filtered multiple sequence alignments (MSAs) improves conformational recovery in some cases but has little effect in others, and model confidence metrics correlate with small-molecule placement but cannot report whether the local pocket geometry was recovered. Furthermore, while orthosteric ligand placement is generally reliable, the single allosteric complex in our set is misplaced by all models, even under explicit guidance. These results identify conformational decoupling as a fundamental limitation of current cofolding approaches across the systems evaluated, with direct implications for state-selective and structure-based drug design.","PeriodicalId":44,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Chemical Information and Modeling ","volume":"88 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":5.6,"publicationDate":"2026-10-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"149221703","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"化学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Structure Prototype Learning for Federated Molecular Property Prediction under Scaffold Heterogeneity","authors":"Tingkai Sun,Xiucai Ye,Tetsuya Sakurai","doi":"10.1021/acs.jcim.6c02297","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1021/acs.jcim.6c02297","url":null,"abstract":"Federated molecular property prediction enables collaboration across private chemical libraries, but parameter averaging does not explicitly account for scaffold heterogeneity. FedSPL groups molecules using fixed descriptors and exchanges embedding prototypes alongside model parameters, enabling label-independent prototype matching while retaining supervised property prediction. Across five classification benchmarks and three heterogeneity levels, matched three-seed evaluation using masked, held-out server-model ROC-AUC showed higher mean final AUC than FedAvg in seven of 15 settings. Consistently positive differences on SIDER and mixed outcomes elsewhere indicate data set-dependent benefits, motivating validation-guided use of structural information in federated prototype learning.","PeriodicalId":44,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Chemical Information and Modeling ","volume":"16 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":5.6,"publicationDate":"2026-10-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"149221629","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"化学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Nishat Nayla Labiba,Md Mushfiqul Islam,Lawrence O. Hall,David S. Simmons
{"title":"Reducing Data Requirements for Sequence–Property Prediction in Copolymer Compatibilizers via Deep Neural Network Tuning","authors":"Nishat Nayla Labiba,Md Mushfiqul Islam,Lawrence O. Hall,David S. Simmons","doi":"10.1021/acs.jcim.6c00178","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1021/acs.jcim.6c00178","url":null,"abstract":"Synthetic sequence-controlled polymers promise to transform polymer science by combining the chemical versatility of synthetic polymers with the precise sequence-mediated functionality of biological proteins. However, design of these materials has proven extraordinarily challenging, because they lack the massive data sets of closely related evolved molecules that accelerate design of proteins. Here, we report on an Artificial Intelligence strategy to reduce the amount of data necessary to accelerate the design of these materials. We focus on data connecting the repeat-unit-sequence of a model compatibilizer molecule to its ability to reduce the interfacial tension between distinct polymer domains. The optimal sequence of these molecules, which are essential for applications such as mixed-waste polymer recycling, depends strongly on variables such as concentration and chemical details of the polymer. We show that a deep neural network trained on low-fidelity data for sequence/interfacial tension relations at one set of conditions can be rapidly tuned to make higher-fidelity predictions at a distinct set of conditions, requiring far less data than would ordinarily be needed within the data sets we have tested. This priming using a pretrained model and then tuning it on unseen data from a different data set approach could allow a single low-fidelity parent data set to accelerate prediction and design in a larger set of related systems.","PeriodicalId":44,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Chemical Information and Modeling ","volume":"56 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":5.6,"publicationDate":"2026-10-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"149218871","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"化学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Synergy-Guided Molecular Redesign of Predicted P-Glycoprotein Substrates toward Synthetically Feasible Non-Substrates","authors":"Soyeon Jeon,Sung Wook Moon,Hyun Woo Kim","doi":"10.1021/acs.jcim.6c01938","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1021/acs.jcim.6c01938","url":null,"abstract":"Drug efflux mediated by P-glycoprotein (P-gp) remains a major barrier to effective small-molecule therapeutics, limiting both bioavailability and central nervous system exposure. While machine learning models can predict P-gp substrates, translating these predictions into actionable molecular design remains largely unexplored, particularly in enabling the rational conversion of substrates into nonsubstrates to mitigate efflux liability. Here, we introduce the synergy-guided fragment genetic algorithm (SF-GA), a computational framework that transforms predictive insight into an interpretable molecular design strategy. By integrating fragment synergy analysis into the mutation stage of a genetic algorithm, SF-GA biases fragment replacement toward co-occurring substructures associated with nonsubstrate classification, enabling interpretability at the chemical structure level and property-directed molecular optimization. Compared with genetic-algorithm and reinforcement-learning baselines under a fixed function-evaluation budget, SF-GA achieves competitive optimization performance while producing molecules with the highest retrosynthetic accessibility among all methods tested. Unlike the baselines, every accepted mutation is reported together with the discarded and inserted fragments and their synergy scores, providing a fragment-level rationale for each structural change; ablation against an unguided and an importance-only control isolates the contribution of bit co-occurrence. The method enables scaffold-preserving and similarity-constrained editing that converts P-gp substrates into predicted nonsubstrates. Docking against two human P-gp structures reveals weaker predicted binding for molecules with higher predicted nonsubstrate probability, motivating future experimental evaluation of P-gp transport.","PeriodicalId":44,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Chemical Information and Modeling ","volume":"11 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":5.6,"publicationDate":"2026-10-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"149218796","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"化学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"A Multimodal Geometric Learning Framework for Interpretable Peptide Toxicity Prediction","authors":"Xin Li,Jinzhou Wu,Rui Wang,Donglin He,Yu-Juan Zhang","doi":"10.1021/acs.jcim.6c02423","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1021/acs.jcim.6c02423","url":null,"abstract":"Peptide therapeutics are promising drug candidates because of their high activity and specificity. However, their potential toxicity poses a major hurdle, making accurate computational toxicity predictions urgently necessary for early safety screening. Existing methods largely rely on sequence data or simple graph representations, thereby limiting their ability to capture higher-order physicochemical interactions. To address this, we propose MBFGNK, an interpretable multimodal geometric learning framework, for peptide toxicity prediction. It integrates sequence representations from pretrained protein language models, 3D structural features via an equivariant graph neural network (EGNN), and physicochemical hypergraph representations capturing global, local, and biologically synergistic residue interactions. A modality attention gate adaptively fuses these heterogeneous data types, while a Chebyshev polynomial-based Kolmogorov–Arnold network (ChebyKAN) models complex nonlinear toxicity patterns. We evaluated MBFGNK using 5-fold cross-validation and an independent test set. The experimental results show that the ensemble achieved an AUC of 0.9687, an MCC of 0.8449, an Acc of 0.9221, and an F1 of 0.9205 on the independent test set, suggesting improved performance relative to previously reported baseline results on the same benchmark. Integrated gradients and modality-level analyses further identified prediction-informative motifs, residues, and spatial regions, providing interpretable evidence consistent with known characteristics of toxic peptides. These results suggest that MBFGNK is an effective and interpretable framework for peptide toxicity prediction and may assist in downstream safety-oriented peptide screening.","PeriodicalId":44,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Chemical Information and Modeling ","volume":"45 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":5.6,"publicationDate":"2026-10-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"149218872","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"化学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Interpretive Limits of Cross-Split AUPRC Differences\u0000in Deep Learning-Based Antibiotic Screening","authors":"Zhijie Pan,Tianming Han,Wenchi Ge,Churong Wang,Qi Zhao","doi":"10.1021/acs.jcim.6c03208","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1021/acs.jcim.6c03208","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Deep learning expands the chemical space accessible to antibiotic discovery, making interpretation of evaluation results increasingly important when only a few compounds can be prioritized from vast candidate libraries. AUPRC depends on test-set prevalence, while molecular splitting can alter training-to-test structural relatedness and test-set class composition, so when prevalence differs across splits, a cross-split AUPRC difference alone cannot quantify how much of the performance change is attributable to structural differences. Cross-split comparisons should therefore report test-set size, positive count, prevalence, splitting method, and the precision-recall summary metric, while direct model comparisons should use the same fixed independent test set whenever possible. Claims about practical screening utility should also consider top-k performance, early enrichment metrics, or prospective experimental hit rates under a prespecified budget, so that evidence remains aligned with the scientific claims it is intended to support.","PeriodicalId":44,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Chemical Information and Modeling ","volume":"27 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":5.6,"publicationDate":"2026-10-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"149210138","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"化学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}