AET5: A transcriptome-guided molecular generation framework with contrastive self-supervised learning

Abstract

Gene expression profiles capture system-level drug responses and offer a promising basis for de novo molecular generation. However, their application is limited by data sparsity and experimental noise, which hinder the reliable mapping between disease-associated transcriptomic perturbations and chemically valid therapeutic molecules. Here, we present AET5, a de novo molecular generation framework that conditions molecular design on disease-reversal gene expression profiles. AET5 integrates contrastive self-supervised learning with pre-trained sequence-to-sequence models to learn robust associations between transcriptomic signatures and molecular structures by deriving noise-tolerant transcriptomic representations and aligning them with molecular sequence space. Across the L1000 dataset, AET5 outperforms existing expression-guided generation methods in generation quality and distributional characteristics, while maintaining favorable physicochemical and drug-related properties. We further apply AET5 to generate candidate compounds for SARS-CoV-2 infection and prostate cancer. Molecular docking and dynamics simulations indicate stable target binding, supporting the biological relevance of the generated molecules. These results demonstrate that disease-reversal expression profiles can effectively guide de novo molecular generation, providing a general framework for biologically informed drug design under noisy transcriptomic conditions.