MolLM: A Unified Language Model to Integrate Biomedical Text with 2D and 3D Molecular Representations

MotivationThe current paradigm of deep learning models for the joint representation of molecules and text primarily relies on 1D or 2D molecular formats, neglecting significant 3D structural information that offers valuable physical insight. This narrow focus inhibits the models versatility and adaptability across a wide range of modalities. Conversely, the limited research focusing on explicit 3D representation tends to overlook textual data within the biomedical domain. ResultsWe present a unified pre-trained language model, MolLM, that concurrently captures 2D and 3D molecular information alongside biomedical text. MolLM consists of a text Transformer encoder and a molecular Transformer encoder, designed to encode both 2D and 3D molecular structures. To support MolLMs self-supervised pre-training, we constructed 160K molecule-text pairings. Employing contrastive learning as a supervisory signal for cross-modal information learning, MolLM demonstrates robust molecular representation capabilities across 4 downstream tasks, including cross-modality molecule and text matching, property prediction, captioning, and text-prompted molecular editing. Through ablation, we demonstrate that the inclusion of explicit 3D representations improves performance in these downstream tasks. Availability and implementationOur code, data, and pre-trained model weights are all available at https://github.com/gersteinlab/MolLM.