journal article·2026-03Open access

Learned Conformational Space and Pharmacophore Into Molecular Foundational Model

Lin Wang, Yifan Wu, Hao Luo, Minglong Liang, Yihang Zhou, Cheng Chen, Chris Liu, Jun Zhang, Yang Zhang

Advanced Science· Volume 13· Issue 17

Abstract

ABSTRACT The emergence of large‐scale chemical pre‐trained models has significantly advanced our ability to capture complex relationships between molecular structures and their functions. Despite the growing interest in molecular foundational model that provide versatile representations and support molecular optimization for downstream tasks, few efforts have integrated explicit chemical knowledge—such as conformational and pharmacophore information—into pre‐training. Given the highly dynamic nature of small molecules in solution, their conformational changes upon target binding, and the critical role of pharmacophore complementarity, it is essential to incorporate these factors into molecular foundational modeling. Here, we present a molecular foundational model that integrates conformational‐space and pharmacophore‐similarity projections during pre‐training to regularize the representation space. The model adopts an Ouroboros‐like architecture, where the molecular graphs are encoded into 1D representation vectors via a graph neural network and subsequently reconstructed back into SMILES sequences through an autoregressive Transformer module. This dual‐module design establishes a flexible and extensible framework for both representation learning and molecular generation within a unified latent space. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our model effectively addresses a variety of practical chemical challenges, including similarity‐based virtual screening, targeted poly‐pharmacology design, chemical property prediction, and directed molecular optimization.
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Research context

OpenAlex topics: Computational Drug Discovery Methods · Machine Learning in Materials Science · Advanced Graph Neural Networks

SciVX discovery tags are terminology-based. OpenAlex topics are source-provided classifications.

Affiliations

Center for AI and Computational Biology Institute of Systems Medicine Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences Suzhou China

State Key Laboratory of Common Mechanism Research for Major Diseases Institute of Systems Medicine Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences Suzhou China

Cancer Science Institute of Singapore National University of Singapore Singapore Singapore

DeepMed Technology (Suzhou) Co., Ltd Suzhou China

Department of Computer Science School of Computing National University of Singapore Singapore Singapore

Department of Biochemistry Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine National University of Singapore Singapore Singapore

Funding

Agency for Science, Technology and Research

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