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Reusability report: Designing organic photoelectronic molecules with descriptor conditional recurrent neural networks

Nature Machine Intelligence volume 2, pages 749–752 (2020)Cite this article

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The Original Article was published on 18 May 2020

arising from P.-C. Kotsias et al. Nature Machine Intelligence https://doi.org/10.1038/s42256-020-0174-5 (2020)

Deep generative models can be trained on unlabelled chemical data to design novel molecules, but it’s challenging to harness the creativity of such models to finding optimal molecules1. In their recent work2, Bjerrum and colleagues present a generative framework based on conditional recurrent neural networks (cRNNs) to translate from a desired property to a string-based chemical representation in the context of drug design. Here we replicate the approach on an unrelated chemical space by designing organic photoelectronic molecules (OPMs) with properties outside the training data. The primary application in the original work was a classification task (identifying active molecules) whereas the task here is to propose molecules with continuous properties close to target values.

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Fig. 1: Repurposing cRNN generates novel OPMs.
Fig. 2: Benchmarking cRNN models against a GB-GA baseline.

Data availability

The chemical structures and labels used for training and validation of the supervised and unsupervised models, with the exception of 684 proprietary molecules, are available at https://github.com/learningmatter-mit/Deep-Drug-Coder20.

Code availability

The code used in this paper is available at https://github.com/learningmatter-mit/Deep-Drug-Coder.

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Acknowledgements

We acknowledge Sumitomo Chemical for providing financial support for this work.

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  1. Department of Materials Science and Engineering, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, USA

    Somesh Mohapatra, Tzuhsiung Yang & Rafael Gómez-Bombarelli

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  1. Somesh Mohapatra
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Contributions

R.G.-B. supervised the research, and planned the project with contributions from S.M. S.M. trained and analysed the machine learning models. T.Y. ran the DFT calculations with contributions from R.G.-B. All authors contributed to the writing of the manuscript.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Rafael Gómez-Bombarelli.

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The authors declare no competing interests.

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Peer review information Nature Machine Intelligence thanks Olexandr Isayev, Connor Coley and the other, anonymous, reviewer(s) for their contribution to the peer review of this work.

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Supplementary Information

Supplementary Discussion Sections 1–8, Figs. 1–3 and Tables 1–5.

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Mohapatra, S., Yang, T. & Gómez-Bombarelli, R. Reusability report: Designing organic photoelectronic molecules with descriptor conditional recurrent neural networks. Nat Mach Intell 2, 749–752 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1038/s42256-020-00268-w

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