Generating reaction trees with cascaded variational autoencoders.

ABSTRACT

To develop useful drugs and materials, chemists synthesize diverse molecules by trying various reactants and reaction routes. Toward automating this process, we propose a deep generative model, called cascaded variational autoencoder (casVAE), for synthesizable molecular design. It generates a reaction tree, where the reactants are chosen from commercially available compounds and the synthesis route is constructed as a tree of reaction templates. The first part of casVAE is designed to generate a molecule called a surrogate product, while the second part constructs a reaction tree that synthesizes it. In benchmarking, casVAE showed its ability to generate reaction trees that yield high-quality and synthesizable molecules. An implementation of casVAE is publicly available at https//github.com/tsudalab/rxngenerator.