Equivariant Graph Neural Networks for Toxicity Prediction

Research output: Contribution to journalResearch articleContributedpeer-review

Contributors

  • Julian Cremer - , Pompeu Fabra University, Pfizer (Author)
  • Leonardo Medrano Sandonas - , University of Luxembourg (Author)
  • Alexandre Tkatchenko - , University of Luxembourg (Author)
  • Djork Arné Clevert - , Pfizer (Author)
  • Gianni De Fabritiis - , Pompeu Fabra University, ICREA - Catalan Institution for Research and Advanced Studies (Author)

Abstract

Predictive modeling of toxicity is a crucial step in the drug discovery pipeline. It can help filter out molecules with a high probability of failing in the early stages of de novo drug design. Thus, several machine learning (ML) models have been developed to predict the toxicity of molecules by combining classical ML techniques or deep neural networks with well-known molecular representations such as fingerprints or 2D graphs. But the more natural, accurate representation of molecules is expected to be defined in physical 3D space like in ab initio methods. Recent studies successfully used equivariant graph neural networks (EGNNs) for representation learning based on 3D structures to predict quantum-mechanical properties of molecules. Inspired by this, we investigated the performance of EGNNs to construct reliable ML models for toxicity prediction. We used the equivariant transformer (ET) model in TorchMD-NET for this. Eleven toxicity data sets taken from MoleculeNet, TDCommons, and ToxBenchmark have been considered to evaluate the capability of ET for toxicity prediction. Our results show that ET adequately learns 3D representations of molecules that can successfully correlate with toxicity activity, achieving good accuracies on most data sets comparable to state-of-the-art models. We also test a physicochemical property, namely, the total energy of a molecule, to inform the toxicity prediction with a physical prior. However, our work suggests that these two properties can not be related. We also provide an attention weight analysis for helping to understand the toxicity prediction in 3D space and thus increase the explainability of the ML model. In summary, our findings offer promising insights considering 3D geometry information via EGNNs and provide a straightforward way to integrate molecular conformers into ML-based pipelines for predicting and investigating toxicity prediction in physical space. We expect that in the future, especially for larger, more diverse data sets, EGNNs will be an essential tool in this domain.

Details

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)1561–1573
JournalChemical Research in Toxicology
Volume36
Issue number10
Early online date10 Sept 2023
Publication statusPublished - 16 Oct 2023
Peer-reviewedYes
Externally publishedYes

External IDs

PubMed 37690056
ORCID /0000-0002-7673-3142/work/182336520

Keywords

ASJC Scopus subject areas