Rep3Net: An Approach Exploiting Multimodal Representation for Molecular Bioactivity Prediction

Abstract

Accurate prediction of compound potency accelerates early-stage drug discovery by prioritizing candidates for experimental testing. However, many Quantitative Structure-Activity Relationship (QSAR) approaches for this prediction are constrained by their choice of molecular representation: handcrafted descriptors capture global properties but miss local topology, graph neural networks encode structure but often lack broader chemical context, and SMILES-based language models provide contextual patterns learned from large corpora but are seldom combined with structural features. To exploit these complementary signals, we introduce Rep3Net, a unified multimodal architecture that fuses RDKit molecular descriptors, graph-derived features from a residual graph-convolutional backbone, and ChemBERTa SMILES embeddings. We evaluate Rep3Net on a curated ChEMBL subset for Human PARP1 using fivefold cross validation. Rep3Net attains an MSE of $0.83\pm0.06$, RMSE of $0.91\pm0.03$, $R^{2}=0.43\pm0.01$, and yields Pearson and Spearman correlations of $0.66\pm0.01$ and $0.67\pm0.01$, respectively, substantially improving over several strong GNN baselines. In addition, Rep3Net achieves a favorable latency-to-parameter trade-off thanks to a single-layer GCN backbone and parallel frozen encoders. Ablations show that graph topology, ChemBERTa semantics, and handcrafted descriptors each contribute complementary information, with full fusion providing the largest error reduction. These results demonstrate that multimodal representation fusion can improve potency prediction for PARP1 and provide a scalable framework for virtual screening in early-stage drug discovery.