Empowering Chemical Structures with Biological Insights for Scalable Phenotypic Virtual Screening

Abstract

Abstract

MOTIVATION: The scalable identification of bioactive compounds is essential for contemporary drug discovery. This process faces a key trade-off: structural screening offers scalability but lacks biological context, whereas high-content phenotypic profiling provides deep biological insights but is resource-intensive. The primary challenge is to extract robust biological signals from noisy data and encode them into representations that do not require biological data at inference. RESULTS: This study presents DECODE (DEcomposing Cellular Observations of Drug Effects), a framework that bridges this gap by empowering chemical representations with intrinsic biological semantics to enable structure-based in silico biological profiling. DECODE leverages limited paired transcriptomic and morphological data as supervisory signals during training, enabling the extraction of a measurement-invariant biological fingerprint from chemical structures and explicit filtering of modality-specific variation. Across held-out retrieval, scaffold-split and UMAP-clustering virtual-screening benchmarks, DECODE improves functional retrieval and early active-compound prioritization over baselines. AVAILABILITY AND IMPLEMENTATION: The codes and datasets of DECODE are available at https://github.com/lian-xiao/DECODE.