A Pretrained Model-Based Approach to Improve Generalization Performance for ADMET Prediction of Drug Candidates

Yoonju Kim, Sanghyun Park

http://doi.org/10.5626/JOK.2025.52.7.601

Accurate prediction of Absorption, Distribution, Metabolism, Excretion, and Toxicity (ADMET) properties plays an important role in reducing clinical trial failure rates and lowering drug development costs. In this study, we propose a novel method to improve ADMET prediction performance for drug candidate compounds by integrating molecular embeddings from a graph transformer model with pretrained embeddings from a UniMol model. The proposed model can capture bond type information from molecular graph structures, generating chemically refined representations, while leveraging UniMol’s pretrained 3D embeddings to effectively learn spatial molecular characteristics. Through this, the model is designed to address the problem of data scarcity and enhance the generalization performance. In this study, we conducted prediction experiments on 10 ADMET properties. The experiment results demonstrated that our proposed model outperformed existing methods and that the prediction accuracy for ADMET properties could be improved by effectively integrating atomic bond information and 3D structures.