Machine Learning

Making AI Work in Discovery Chemistry: Precision, Trust, and Practical Value

Key takeaways from the Optibrium panel discussion featuring Nathan Brown, Charlotte Deane, Pat Walters, Chris Swain, and Paul Czodrowski on AI strategy, data leakage, generative risks, and LLMs in drug discovery.

Jul 30, 2026

Beyond Parameter Counts: The Shift Toward Rigorous Evaluation in Scientific AI

Limitations of scale-based evaluation in structural biology, and the transition toward physical grounding, out-of-distribution generalization, and biophysical developability validation.

Jul 21, 2026

Graph Neural Networks and DGL: A Beginner's Guide

Introduction to graph representation learning, neighborhood aggregation, and Deep Graph Library (DGL) workflows, including a glossary and tutorial reference map.

Jul 10, 2026

Ensemble Docking for Binding and Activity Prediction

Limitations of static single-structure docking for flexible targets, and an integrated workflow combining molecular dynamics, clustering, and machine learning.

Jul 5, 2026

You Are Not an Impostor: Agentic Coding and the New Computational Scientist

A pipeline I never wrote a line of worked flawlessly on the first try, and it left me with impostor syndrome. Here is why relying on AI agents is not cheating, but a permanent shift in what scientific expertise actually means.

Jun 23, 2026

Reproducible ≠ Robust: Why One UMAP Seed Isn't Enough to Trust a Split

Pinning random_state=42 makes a UMAP-based train/test split perfectly reproducible — and that is exactly why it can lull you into a false sense of rigor. Reproducibility guarantees you get the same answer every run; it says nothing about whether that answer is typical. Here's the distinction, why it matters for evaluating GNNs on chemical-domain shifts, and how to fix it.

Jun 23, 2026

Does data leakage really inflate binding-affinity GNNs? A laptop-scale reproduction

I tried to reproduce the well-known PDBbind data-leakage effect with a small 3D GNN on a laptop — and couldn't. Two independent diagnostics show why: leakage only inflates models strong enough to memorize.

Jun 19, 2026

A History of Graph Neural Networks in Drug Discovery

Graphs in drug discovery have gone from a quiet background tool to one of the main ways we think about molecules, proteins, and their interactions. This post walks through that story: how the field moved from fingerprints and QSAR to today’s 3D, attention-based graph neural networks operating directly on protein-ligand complexes.

Jun 8, 2026

Beyond SMILES: The Evolving Landscape of Molecular Representations

This post summarizes the key ideas from Zhang et al. (2026), “Molecular Knowledge Representations in the Era of Artificial Intelligence,” a preprint published on ChemRxiv (DOI: 10.26434/chemrxiv.15002830/v1). The Core Problem Molecules are quantum-mechanical objects. Their exact description is computationally intractable, and any real sample is a messy mixture of impurities, conformers, and side products. This means every representation of a molecule is, by necessity, an approximation — shaped by the interactions and length scales we care about.

May 23, 2026

Computational Strategies for Accelerating Drug Discovery: A Comprehensive Review

A comprehensive walkthrough of cheminformatics, machine learning, molecular docking, ADMET prediction, and molecular dynamics simulations as the modern toolbox for computer-aided drug discovery.

May 10, 2026