PhD Seminar • Bioinformatics | Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning • Knowledge-infused Conditional Generative Models for Drug Discovery Synthetic Data

Tuesday, November 25, 2025 2:00 pm - 3:00 pm EST (GMT -05:00)

Please note: This PhD seminar will take place in DC 2314 and online.

Bing Hu, PhD candidate
David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science

Supervisors: Professors Anita Layton, Helen Chen

The role of Artificial Intelligence (AI) is growing in every stage of drug development. Nevertheless, a major challenge in drug discovery AI remains: Drug pharmacokinetic (PK) and Drug-Target Interaction (DTI) datasets collected in different studies often exhibit limited overlap, creating data overlap sparsity. Thus, data curation becomes difficult, negatively impacting downstream research investigations in high-throughput screening, polypharmacy, and drug combination.

We propose xImagand-DKI, a novel SMILES/Protein-to-Pharmacokinetic/DTI diffusion model capable of generating an array of PK and DTI target properties conditioned on SMILES and protein inputs that exhibit data overlap sparsity. We apply domain knowledge integration (DKI) with additional molecular and genomic domain knowledge from the Gene Ontology and molecular fingerprints to further improve our model performance. We show that xImagand-DKI generates synthetic PK data that closely resemble real data univariate and bivariate distributions, and can adequately fill in gaps among PK and DTI datasets. As such, xImagand-DKI is a promising solution for data overlap sparsity and may improve performance for downstream drug discovery research tasks.


To attend this PhD seminar in person, please go to DC 2314. You can also attend virtually on MS Teams.