用大模型逐步推理,让药物毒性预测更可解释且更准。
CoTox: Chain-of-Thought-Based Molecular Toxicity Reasoning and Prediction
- 结合化学结构与生物通路,通过大模型逐步推理预测多类毒性。
- 使用GPT-4o时准确率超越传统机器学习与深度学习模型。
- 用IUPAC名代替SMILES提升模型理解力,适合药企早期安全评估。
药物毒性仍是药物研发的主要挑战。尽管近期机器学习模型在体外毒性预测方面有所提升,但其对标注数据的依赖及缺乏可解释性限制了应用,难以捕捉由复杂生物机制驱动的器官特异性毒性。大语言模型(LLMs)凭借逐步推理和文本数据整合能力提供了新思路,但现有方法缺乏生物学背景与透明推理过程。为此,我们提出CoTox框架,将大语言模型与链式思维(CoT)推理结合,实现多毒性预测。CoTox融合化学结构、生物通路与基因本体(GO)术语,通过逐步推理生成可解释的毒性预测。利用GPT-4o,我们证明CoTox在性能上优于传统机器学习与深度学习模型。进一步对比多种大模型,发现其在特定模型上表现最优。此外,我们发现使用更易被大模型理解的IUPAC命名表示化学结构,能显著增强推理能力并提升预测效果。为验证实用性,我们模拟药物在相关细胞类型中的处理,并将生物背景信息引入框架,使预测结果与生理响应一致。案例研究证实该方法在早期药物安全性评估中具有潜力。代码与提示语已公开于https://github.com/dmis-lab/CoTox。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Drug toxicity remains a major challenge in pharmaceutical development. Recent machine learning models have improved in silico toxicity prediction, but their reliance on annotated data and lack of interpretability limit their applicability. This limits their ability to capture organ-specific toxicities driven by complex biological mechanisms. Large language models (LLMs) offer a promising alternative through step-by-step reasoning and integration of textual data, yet prior approaches lack biological context and transparent rationale. To address this issue, we propose CoTox, a novel framework that integrates LLM with chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning for multi-toxicity prediction. CoTox combines chemical structure data, biological pathways, and gene ontology (GO) terms to generate interpretable toxicity predictions through step-by-step reasoning. Using GPT-4o, we show that CoTox outperforms both traditional machine learning and deep learning model. We further examine its performance across various LLMs to identify where CoTox is most effective. Additionally, we find that representing chemical structures with IUPAC names, which are easier for LLMs to understand than SMILES, enhances the model's reasoning ability and improves predictive performance. To demonstrate its practical utility in drug development, we simulate the treatment of relevant cell types with drug and incorporated the resulting biological context into the CoTox framework. This approach allow CoTox to generate toxicity predictions aligned with physiological responses, as shown in case study. This result highlights the potential of LLM-based frameworks to improve interpretability and support early-stage drug safety assessment. The code and prompt used in this work are available at https://github.com/dmis-lab/CoTox.
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