Jul 2026· Journal of Medicinal Chemistry· Vol 69, pp. 16509-16528· 0 citations· 161 references
Medicine
TL;DR
This study highlights the utility of large-scale MTL for pharmacokinetics profiling and contributes practical tools and data sets for the community, and reports a unified ChemProp-based MTL model capable of handling hundreds of continuous tasks simultaneously, which has practical advantages for model deployment and maintenance.
Abstract
Multitask learning is a promising strategy in computational drug discovery, potentially improving predictive performance and generalization over traditional single-task models. MTL has shown particular value in absorption, distribution, metabolism, elimination, and toxicity (ADMET) and potency predictions, which are key for drug design. Yet, many existing Web servers rely on the same uncurated, decade-old data sets, creating an illusion of diversity. This work critically reviews open-source ADMET Web services, revealing extensive data redundancy and limited curation across the field. We introduce OneADMET, a meticulously curated data set of 738,161 compounds with 1,119,719 measurements spanning 44 ADMET end points and 1 489 biological activities. We report a unified ChemProp-based MTL model capable of handling hundreds of continuous tasks simultaneously, which has practical advantages for model deployment and maintenance. Additionally, we observed that these MTL models match or surpass single-task models in predictive accuracy. This study highlights the utility of large-scale MTL for pharmacokinetics profiling and contributes practical tools and data sets for the community.
Drug discovery is frequently limited by high attrition rates, and poor absorption, distribution, metabolism, excretion, and toxicity (ADMET) profiles are a major cause of late-stage failure. Therefore, precise ADMET property prediction is necessary to develop safe and effective drug candidates. Traditional experimental assays and rule-based computational procedures are limited by their poor predictive power, cost, and time, despite providing valuable insights. Innovative strategies to deal with these issues have been introduced by developments in artificial intelligence (AI), such as machine learning (ML), deep learning (DL), graph neural networks (GNNs), generative models, and multi-task learning (MTL). AI techniques can better generalize scaffolds, capture interdependencies between pharmacokinetic and toxicological endpoints, and model complex nonlinear relationships by leveraging large, diverse datasets. Explainable AI (XAI) enhances transparency by detecting biological and structural characteristics that are relevant to predictions, even if integrated pipelines combine predictive modeling with molecular creation and optimization. AI-driven ADMET prediction is becoming a vital tool in lowering attrition, speeding up candidate prioritization, and influencing the direction of rational drug development, despite persistent issues with data quality, regulatory acceptance, and synthetic viability.
Satyam Kumar Vishwash, Ram Babu Soni, Ratima Sood et al.· Current Computer - Aided Dru...· 0 citations
This work presents a model validation framework consisting of five recommendations that would enable the community to move beyond aggregate metrics toward understanding where and why molecular property prediction models fail, and connects evaluation choices to real-world applications and case studies encountered in pharmaceutical research.
Srijit Seal, Akshat Shirish Zalte, David Alencar Araripe et al.· bioRxiv· 0 citations
A dedicated Python-based computational package designed for the systematic development, training, and evaluation of ML models with an explicit consideration of interspecies data integration in ADMET modeling, offering quantitative guidance on when and how cross-species and cross-assay data improve predictive performance.
Hubert Rybka, Konrad Masztalerz, Sabina Podlewska· Chemical Research in Toxicol...· 0 citations
Predicting the absorption, distribution, metabolism, excretion and toxicity (ADMET) properties of small molecules remains a major challenge in drug discovery. Here, we present MEGA-CL, a foundation graph neural network framework for universal molecular ADMET prediction. MEGA-CL integrates self-supervised contrastive learning with a multi-head external attention mechanism and an enhanced message-passing architecture, enabling simultaneous modeling of local chemical substructures and global inter-graph relationships while mitigating over-smoothing effects commonly observed in deep graph networks. Across 13 benchmark datasets and 21 downstream ADMET tasks, MEGA-CL consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baseline models. In particular, the framework demonstrates robust performance on challenging regression tasks, including clearance (CL) and steady-state volume of distribution (VDss), while maintaining strong generalization ability in independent external validation. Clinically relevant predictive accuracy was achieved, with more than 75% of predictions falling within a 3-fold error range. In an external evaluation on 18 novel compounds derived from recently approved FDA drugs, over 50% of human liver microsome clearance (HLMC) predictions were within a 2-fold error range. To further assess its practical applicability, MEGA-CL was prospectively evaluated on three preclinical drug candidates using in vitro hepatic microsomal metabolism assays and CYP450 inhibition assays guided by model predictions. The predicted HLMC values for all candidates were within 2.5-fold of the experimentally measured values, and 73.3% of CYP450 inhibition endpoints (11/15) were correctly classified. These results demonstrate the potential of MEGA-CL as a generalizable framework for accelerating in silico ADMET evaluation and early-stage drug candidate optimization.
Tinghui Jin, Kedu Jin, Ying Li et al.· arXiv.org· 0 citations
Monroe is presented, a new MFM with several innovations over the existing state of the art: increased scale allowing pre-training on over 81 million molecules from the PM6 quantum chemistry dataset; improved graph representation of stereochemistry; improved training losses including conformer denoising and embedding decorrelation; improved multi-task learning; and the use of a prior-data-fitted model (TabPFN) for downstream in-context prediction.
Blazej Banaszewski, Andrew W. Fitzgibbon· 0 citations
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