Liu_2024_Front.Artif.Intell_7_1374148

Alzheimer's disease (AD) is a gradually advancing neurodegenerative disorder characterized by a concealed onset. Acetylcholinesterase (AChE) is an efficient hydrolase that catalyzes the hydrolysis of acetylcholine (ACh), which regulates the concentration of ACh at synapses and then terminates ACh-mediated neurotransmission. There are inhibitors to inhibit the activity of AChE currently, but its side effects are inevitable. In various application fields where Al have gained prominence, neural network-based models for molecular design have recently emerged and demonstrate encouraging outcomes. However, in the conditional molecular generation task, most of the current generation models need additional optimization algorithms to generate molecules with intended properties which make molecular generation inefficient. Consequently, we introduce a cognitive-conditional molecular design model, termed PED, which leverages the variational auto-encoder. Its primary function is to adeptly produce a molecular library tailored for specific properties. From this library, we can then identify molecules that inhibit AChE activity without adverse effects. These molecules serve as lead compounds, hastening AD treatment and concurrently enhancing the AI's cognitive abilities. In this study, we aim to fine-tune a VAE model pre-trained on the ZINC database using active compounds of AChE collected from Binding DB. Different from other molecular generation models, the PED can simultaneously perform both property prediction and molecule generation, consequently, it can generate molecules with intended properties without additional optimization process. Experiments of evaluation show that proposed model performs better than other methods benchmarked on the same data sets. The results indicated that the model learns a good representation of potential chemical space, it can well generate molecules with intended properties. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets confirmed PED's efficiency and efficacy. Furthermore, we also verified the binding ability of molecules to AChE through molecular docking. The results showed that our molecular generation system for AD shows excellent cognitive capacities, the molecules within the molecular library could bind well to AChE and inhibit its activity, thus preventing the hydrolysis of ACh.