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June 5th, 2025
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East China Normal University
cancer biology
biorxiv

Contrastive Learning-Enhanced Drug Metabolite Prediction Drives the Discovery of an Orally Bioavailable RSK4 Inhibitor for Esophageal Cancer

He, H.Open in Google Scholar•Zhang, M.Open in Google Scholar•Yang, X.Open in Google Scholar•He, S.Open in Google Scholar•Shi, X.Open in Google Scholar•Hu, F.Open in Google Scholar•Liu, C.Open in Google Scholar•Zhang, X.Open in Google Scholar•Chen, N.Open in Google Scholar•Zhu, X.Open in Google Scholaret al.

Drug metabolism liabilities are a major bottleneck in drug development, necessitating accurate metabolite prediction tools. While AI-driven methods have advanced, challenges remain in achieving high-precision, robustness, broad reaction coverage and seamless integration into the drug development workflow. To address this, we first constructed the most comprehensive human-specific drug metabolism database to date, encompassing 11,665 human metabolic reactions and 2,497 high-quality rules. Leveraging this resource, we developed ConMeter (Contrastive learning and feature interaction based Metabolic Reaction prediction), a novel model integrating chemical feature interaction and contrastive learning. ConMeter demonstrates significant improvements, achieving ~80% accuracy in identifying at least one metabolite within the top 5 predictions and showing an average 25% relative enhancement in ranking true positives compared to state-of-the-art methods. The comprehensive database also expands the range of predictable metabolic reactions. To demonstrate the utility of ConMeter, we integrated it into a metabolite prediction-guided drug design strategy aimed at addressing the low oral bioavailability of a metabolically vulnerable RSK4 lead compound-a pervasive issue among known RSK inhibitors. This strategy successfully yielded R636, a novel RSK4 inhibitor exhibiting remarkably improved bioavailability (a 63-fold increase, reaching 63% absolute bioavailability) while maintaining its potent activity. Notably, R636 showed favorable safety profile and significant anti-tumor efficacy against esophageal squamous cell carcinoma (ESCC) in vitro and in two distinct patient-derived xenograft (PDX) mouse models. This work introduces ConMeter as a powerful and practical tool for high-accuracy metabolite prediction, demonstrating its potential to accelerate lead optimization, exemplified by the discovery of R636 as a promising orally bioavailable candidate for ESCC.

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