Evaluating the Use of Graph Neural Networks and Transfer Learning for Oral Bioavailability Prediction

Oral bioavailability is a pharmacokinetic property that plays an important role in drug discovery. Recently developed computational models involve the use of molecular descriptors, fingerprints, and conventional machine-learning models. However, determining the type of molecular descriptors requires domain expert knowledge and time for feature selection. With the emergence of the graph neural network (GNN), models can be trained to automatically extract features that they deem important. In this article, we exploited the automatic feature selection of GNN to predict oral bioavailability. To enhance the prediction performance of GNN, we utilized transfer learning by pre-training a model to predict solubility and obtained a final average accuracy of 0.797, an F1 score of 0.840, and an AUC-ROC of 0.867, which outperformed previous studies on predicting oral bioavailability with the same test data set.