Decoding the limits of deep learning in molecular docking for drug discovery
October 2025 Yue Li, Jiacai Yi, Hui Li, Kun Li, Fenghua Kang, Youchao Deng, Chengkun Wu, Xiangzheng Fu, Dejun Jiang, Dongsheng Cao Chemical Science
Co-first author IF 7.4 · JCR Q1

Structure-based molecular docking, a cornerstone of computational drug design, is undergoing a paradigm shift fueled by deep learning (DL) innovations. However, the rapid proliferation of DL-driven docking methods…

Pushing the boundaries of few-shot learning for low-data drug discovery with a Bayesian meta-learning hypernetwork framework
July 2025 Jiacai Yi, Dejun Jiang, Chengkun Wu, Xiaochen Zhang, Weixing He, Wentao Zhao, Dongsheng Cao Briefings in Bioinformatics
First author IF 7.7 · JCR Q1

Hunting for candidate compounds with favorable pharmacological, toxicological, and pharmacokinetic properties in drug discovery is essentially a low-data problem, as data acquisition is both challenging and expensive.…

DDInter 2.0: an enhanced drug interaction resource with expanded data coverage, new interaction types, and improved user interface
January 2025 Yao Tian, Jiacai Yi, Ningning Wang, Chengkun Wu, Jinfu Peng, Shao Liu, Guoping Yang, Dongsheng Cao Nucleic Acids Research
Co-first author IF 13.1 · JCR Q1

Drug interactions pose significant challenges in clinical practice, potentially leading to adverse drug reactions, reduced efficacy, and even life-threatening consequences. DDInter 2.0 substantially expands data…

ADMETlab 3.0: an updated comprehensive online ADMET prediction platform enhanced with broader coverage, improved performance, API functionality and decision support
July 2024 Li Fu, Shaohua Shi, Jiacai Yi, Ningning Wang, Yuanhang He, Zhenxing Wu, Jinfu Peng, Youchao Deng, Wenxuan Wang, Chengkun Wu, Aiping Lyu, Xiangxiang Zeng, Wentao Zhao, Tingjun Hou, Dongsheng Cao Nucleic Acids Research
Co-first author IF 13.1 · JCR Q1

ADMETlab 3.0 is the second updated version of the web server that provides a comprehensive and efficient platform for evaluating ADMET-related parameters as well as physicochemical properties and medicinal chemistry…

ChemFH: an integrated tool for screening frequent false positives in chemical biology and drug discovery
July 2024 Shaohua Shi, Li Fu, Jiacai Yi, Ziyi Yang, Xiaochen Zhang, Youchao Deng, Wenxuan Wang, Chengkun Wu, Wentao Zhao, Tingjun Hou, Xiangxiang Zeng, Aiping Lyu, Dongsheng Cao Nucleic Acids Research
Co-first author IF 13.1 · JCR Q1

High-throughput screening rapidly tests extensive arrays of chemical compounds to identify hit compounds for specific biological targets in drug discovery. However, false-positive results disrupt hit-to-lead progression…

OptADMET: a web-based tool for substructure modifications to improve ADMET properties of lead compounds
April 2024 Jiacai Yi, Shaohua Shi, Li Fu, Ziyi Yang, Pengfei Nie, Aiping Lu, Chengkun Wu, Yafeng Deng, Changyu Hsieh, Xiangxiang Zeng, Tingjun Hou, Dongsheng Cao Nature Protocols
First author IF 16 · JCR Q1

Lead optimization is a crucial step in drug discovery, aiming to design potential drug candidates from biologically active hits. During lead optimization, active hits undergo modifications to achieve a balance between…

ChemMORT: an automatic ADMET optimization platform using deep learning and multi-objective particle swarm optimization
March 2024 Jiacai Yi, Ziyi Yang, Wentao Zhao, Zhijiang Yang, Xiaochen Zhang, Chengkun Wu, Aiping Lu, Dongsheng Cao Briefings in Bioinformatics
First author IF 7.7 · JCR Q1

Drug discovery and development constitute a laborious and costly undertaking. The success of a drug hinges not only on good efficacy but also on acceptable ADMET properties. ChemMORT is an automatic ADMET optimization…

MICER: a pre-trained encoder-decoder architecture for molecular image captioning
October 2022 Jiacai Yi, Chengkun Wu, Xiaochen Zhang, Xinyi Xiao, Yanlong Qiu, Wentao Zhao, Tingjun Hou, Dongsheng Cao Bioinformatics
First author IF 5.4 · JCR Q1

Automatic recognition of chemical structures from molecular images provides an important avenue for the rediscovery of chemicals. Traditional rule-based approaches rely on expert knowledge and struggle with diverse…

ABC-Net: a divide-and-conquer based deep learning architecture for SMILES recognition from molecular images
March 2022 Xiaochen Zhang, Jiacai Yi, Guoping Yang, Chengkun Wu, Tingjun Hou, Dongsheng Cao Briefings in Bioinformatics

ABC-Net proposes a divide-and-conquer architecture for translating molecular images into SMILES strings. By decomposing the recognition problem into coordinated sub-tasks, the model improves robustness across diverse…

DDInter: an online drug-drug interaction database towards improving clinical decision-making and patient safety
January 2022 Guoli Xiong, Zhijiang Yang, Jiacai Yi, Ningning Wang, Lei Wang, Huimin Zhu, Chengkun Wu, Aiping Lu, Xiang Chen, Shao Liu, Tingjun Hou, Dongsheng Cao Nucleic Acids Research
Co-first author IF 13.1 · JCR Q1

Drug-drug interaction (DDI) can trigger many adverse effects in patients and has emerged as a threat to medicine and public health. We present DDInter, a curated DDI database with comprehensive data, practical…

Pushing the Boundaries of Molecular Property Prediction for Drug Discovery with Multitask Learning BERT Enhanced by SMILES Enumeration
January 2022 Xiaochen Zhang, Chengkun Wu, Jiacai Yi, Xiangxiang Zeng, Canqun Yang, Aiping Lyu, Tingjun Hou, Dongsheng Cao Research

This work explores multitask molecular property prediction with a BERT framework enhanced by SMILES enumeration. The study shows that large-scale pretraining and sequence augmentation can improve robustness and…

ADMETlab 2.0: an integrated online platform for accurate and comprehensive predictions of ADMET properties
July 2021 Guoli Xiong, Zhenxing Wu, Jiacai Yi, Li Fu, Zhijiang Yang, Changyu Hsieh, Mingzhu Yin, Xiangxiang Zeng, Chengkun Wu, Aiping Lu, Xiang Chen, Tingjun Hou, Dongsheng Cao Nucleic Acids Research
Co-first author IF 13.1 · JCR Q1 Cited 2,500+

Because undesirable pharmacokinetics and toxicity of candidate compounds are the main reasons for the failure of drug development, it has been widely recognized that ADMET should be evaluated as early as possible. Here,…

MG-BERT: leveraging unsupervised atomic representation learning for molecular property prediction
January 2021 Xiaochen Zhang, Chengkun Wu, Zhijiang Yang, Zhenhua Wu, Jiacai Yi, Chang-Yu Hsieh, Tingjun Hou, Dongsheng Cao Briefings in Bioinformatics

MG-BERT introduces a BERT-style framework for unsupervised atomic representation learning from molecular structures. The learned representations improve downstream molecular property prediction and demonstrate the value…