Leveraging 3D Molecular Spatial Visual Information and Multi‐Perspective Representations for Drug Discovery

Drug discovery remains a costly and time-intensive process, where accurate identification of drug associations is critical for therapeutic development. Existing computational approaches predominantly rely on sequence-derived or 2D molecular representations, often overlooking the intrinsic 3D complexity of small molecules. Here, a deep learning framework is presented that directly learns from 3D molecular spatial visual information, capturing geometric, topological, and stereochemical features from spatial renderings. By integrating this spatial information with traditional molecular descriptors, unified multi-perspective representations are constructed that better reflect molecular structure and function. Across benchmark tasks involving drug-microRNA, drug-drug, and drug-protein interaction prediction, this model consistently outperforms conventional fingerprint-based baselines. Interpretability analyses show that the model attends to biologically relevant substructures, highlighting the value of 3D molecular spatial visual information in molecular recognition. These findings demonstrate the potential of spatially informed learning to enhance predictive performance and provide mechanistic insights in computational drug discovery.

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Publication Details

Journal
Advanced Science
Published
2025-10-15
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1002/advs.202512453
Citations
9
Primary Topic
Computational Drug Discovery Methods
Type
article
Field-Weighted Citation Impact
13.54
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article

Leveraging 3D Molecular Spatial Visual Information and Multi‐Perspective Representations for Drug Discovery

Lun Hu, Feng Tan, Xiaobo Zhu, Yuan Bo Huang et al.
9 citations
Advanced Science
Computational Drug Discovery Methods
13.54
article

Leveraging 3D Molecular Spatial Visual Information and Multi‐Perspective Representations for Drug Discovery

Lun Hu, Feng Tan, Xiaobo Zhu, Yuan Bo Huang, Pengwei Hu, Xun Deng, Xi Zhou, Zhu‐Hong You, Yujie Qi, Zimai Zhang
article en
9 citations

Abstract

Drug discovery remains a costly and time-intensive process, where accurate identification of drug associations is critical for therapeutic development. Existing computational approaches predominantly rely on sequence-derived or 2D molecular representations, often overlooking the intrinsic 3D complexity of small molecules. Here, a deep learning framework is presented that directly learns from 3D molecular spatial visual information, capturing geometric, topological, and stereochemical features from spatial renderings. By integrating this spatial information with traditional molecular descriptors, unified multi-perspective representations are constructed that better reflect molecular structure and function. Across benchmark tasks involving drug-microRNA, drug-drug, and drug-protein interaction prediction, this model consistently outperforms conventional fingerprint-based baselines. Interpretability analyses show that the model attends to biologically relevant substructures, highlighting the value of 3D molecular spatial visual information in molecular recognition. These findings demonstrate the potential of spatially informed learning to enhance predictive performance and provide mechanistic insights in computational drug discovery.

Advanced ScienceVol. 13(2)
Merck KGaA, Darmstadt (Germany) (DE), Northwestern Polytechnical University (CN), Chinese Academy of Sciences (CN), Xinjiang Technical Institute of Physics & Chemistry (CN), University of Chinese Academy of Sciences (CN), Xinjiang University (CN)
Openalex Percentile: Top 1%
Computational Drug Discovery Methods
13.54
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