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Pharmacological development optimization with TX -ll
An advanced linguistic model to predict the properties of biological entities and accelerate the discovery of drugs
Isabella V10 October 2024

 


 Tx-LLM is an innovative language model that aims to optimize the therapeutic development process by predicting the properties of biological entities. Through the use of machine learning, it aims to reduce time and cost in drug discovery by analyzing critical data throughout the development pipeline.

Key points:

  •  Tx-LLM is an improved language model for prediction in drug discovery.
  •  It has been trained on 66 datasets relevant to the therapeutic development process.
  •  It shows competitive performance with existing specialized models, particularly in tasks that combine molecular and textual data.
  •  The data collection, called Therapeutics Instruction Tuning (TxT), provides a detailed framework for training the model.

The field of drug discovery faces significant challenges, with a high percentage of candidates failing to pass clinical trials and an average development time of 10 to 15 years, with costs that can reach $2 billion. These issues highlight the importance of optimizing the development pipeline, where each stage requires the drug to meet a complex set of criteria. In this context, it is critical that a drug interacts specifically with its target while minimizing toxicity and ensuring adequate pharmacokinetics. In addition, large-scale manufacturing is another aspect to consider. The traditional, experiment-based approach is costly and laborious, paving the way for innovative solutions, such as the use of machine learning models.

Tx-LLM, a large-scale language model, represents a significant step forward in this scenario. Developed from PaLM-2, Tx-LLM is specifically designed to predict the properties of a wide range of biological entities, including small molecules, proteins and diseases, relevant to therapeutic research. Trained on a large data set covering the entire development pathway from target recognition to clinical trials, the model has been shown to achieve competitive results with existing models, outperforming some of them in numerous tasks. Tx-LLM’s ability to integrate molecular and textual information was particularly evident, proving effective in predicting a drug’s likelihood of approval based on its characteristics and clinical context.

The training process of Tx-LLM is based on a structured approach, known as Therapeutics Instruction Tuning (TxT), which organizes data in an instruction-response format. This strategy allows the model to learn through prompts containing contextual information, questions, and answers, making the model versatile and adaptable to different tasks. Task categories include classification, regression, and generation, each of which is formulated to maximize the predictive effectiveness of the model. The performance results revealed that Tx-LLM can predict numerical values with surprising accuracy, challenging previous expectations regarding the capabilities of LLMs in this area.

Analysis of the results showed that Tx-LLM is particularly effective when it comes to combining information from small molecules and textual data. This synergy is attributed to the pre-training of the model, which included a wide range of disease information. In addition, ablation studies revealed that increasing the size of the model led to a significant improvement in performance. Despite the promising results, it is important to note that Tx-LLM has not yet reached the level of effectiveness of specialized models for all tasks. Experimental validation continues to be a crucial step in the therapeutic development process.

Tx-LLM, while not yet tuned to follow natural language and explain its predictions, represents an exciting opportunity to improve efficiency in drug discovery. The development team is exploring ways to make the model’s capabilities available to outside researchers, with the goal of gathering feedback and useful use cases to guide future research. Potential integration with other models represents a fascinating direction for the evolution of Tx-LLM, setting the stage for further advancement in therapeutic research.

Tx-LLM emerges as a valuable tool in the drug discovery landscape.