Multitask finetuning and acceleration of chemical pretrained models for small molecule drug property prediction

Chemical pretrained models, sometimes referred to as foundation models, are receiving considerable interest for drug discovery applications. The general chemical knowledge extracted from self-supervised training has the potential to improve predictions for critical drug discovery endpoints, including on-target potency and ADMET properties. Multi-task learning has previously been successfully leveraged to improve predictive models. Here, we show that enabling multitasking in finetuning of chemical pretrained graph neural network models such as Kinetic GROVER Multi-Task (KERMT), an enhanced version of the GROVER model, and Knowledge-guided Pre-training of Graph Transformer (KGPT) significantly improves performance over non-pretrained graph neural network models. Surprisingly, we find that the performance improvement from finetuning KERMT in a multitask manner is most significant at larger data sizes. Additionally, we publish two multitask ADMET data splits to enable more accurate benchmarking of multitask deep learning methods for drug property prediction. Finally, we provide an accelerated implementation of the KERMT model on GitHub, unlocking large-scale pretraining, finetuning, and inference in industrial drug discovery workflows.

BioNeMo Framework: a modular, high-performance library for AI model development in drug discovery

Artificial Intelligence models encoding biology and chemistry are opening new routes to high-throughput and high-quality in-silico drug development. However, their training increasingly relies on computational scale, with recent protein language models (pLM) training on hundreds of graphical processing units (GPUs). We introduce the BioNeMo Framework to facilitate the training of computational biology and chemistry AI models across hundreds of GPUs. Its modular design allows the integration of individual components, such as data loaders, into existing workflows and is open to community contributions. We detail technical features of the BioNeMo Framework through use cases such as pLM pre-training and fine-tuning. On 256 NVIDIA A100s, BioNeMo Framework trains a three billion parameter BERT-based pLM on over one trillion tokens in 4.2 days. The BioNeMo Framework is open-source and free for everyone to use.