Recently, deep generative models have revealed itself as a promising way of performing de novo molecule design. However, previous research has focused mainly on generating SMILES strings instead of molecular graphs. Although available, current graph generative models are are often too general and computationally expensive. In this work, a new de novo molecular design framework is proposed based on a type of sequential graph generators that do not use atom level recurrent units. Compared with previous graph generative models, the proposed method is much more tuned for molecule generation and has been scaled up to cover significantly larger molecules in the ChEMBL database. It is shown that the graph-based model outperforms SMILES based models in a variety of metrics, especially in the rate of valid outputs. For the application of drug design tasks, conditional graph generative model is employed. This method offers highe flexibility and is suitable for generation based on multiple objectives. The results have demonstrated that this approach can be effectively applied to solve several drug design problems, including the generation of compounds containing a given scaffold, compounds with specific drug-likeness and synthetic accessibility requirements, as well as dual inhibitors against JNK3 and GSK-3β.

Marine organisms are expected to be an important source of inspiration for drug discovery after terrestrial plants and microorganisms. Despite the remarkable progress in the field of marine natural products (MNPs) chemistry, there are only a few open access databases dedicated to MNPs research. To meet the growing demand for mining and sharing for MNPs-related data resources, we developed CMNPD, a comprehensive marine natural products database based on manually curated data. CMNPD currently contains more than 31 000 chemical entities with various physicochemical and pharmacokinetic properties, standardized biological activity data, systematic taxonomy and geographical distribution of source organisms, and detailed literature citations. It is an integrated platform for structure dereplication (assessment of novelty) of (marine) natural products, discovery of lead compounds, data mining of structure-activity relationships and investigation of chemical ecology. Access is available through a user-friendly web interface at https://www.cmnpd.org. We are committed to providing a free data sharing platform for not only professional MNPs researchers but also the broader scientific community to facilitate drug discovery from the ocean.