<!DOCTYPE article PUBLIC "-//NLM//DTD JATS (Z39.96) Journal Archiving and Interchange DTD with MathML3 v1.3 20210610//EN" "JATS-archivearticle1-3-mathml3.dtd"><article xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"
  dtd-version="1.3" xml:lang="en" article-type="research-article">
  <?DTDIdentifier.IdentifierValue -//NLM//DTD JATS (Z39.96) Journal Publishing DTD v1.2 20190208//EN?>
  <?DTDIdentifier.IdentifierType public?>
  <?SourceDTD.DTDName JATS-journalpublishing1.dtd?>
  <?SourceDTD.Version 1.2?>
  <?ConverterInfo.XSLTName jats2jats3.xsl?>
  <?ConverterInfo.Version 1?>
  <?properties open_access?>
  <front>
    <journal-meta>
      <journal-id journal-id-type="iso-abbrev">Pharmacophore</journal-id>
      <journal-id journal-id-type="publisher-id">pharmacophorejournal.com</journal-id>
      <journal-id journal-id-type="publisher-id">Pharmacophore</journal-id>
      <journal-title-group>
        <journal-title>Pharmacophore</journal-title>
      </journal-title-group>
      <issn pub-type="epub">2229-5402</issn>
    </journal-meta>
    <article-meta>
      <article-id pub-id-type="publisher-id">pharmacophorejournal.com-6861</article-id>
      <article-id pub-id-type="doi">10.51847/5j6ZDADI4r</article-id>
      <article-categories>
        <subj-group subj-group-type="heading">
          <subject>Original research</subject>
        </subj-group>
      </article-categories>
      <title-group>
        <article-title>Contrastive Molecular Learning for Antiviral Hit Prioritization Using Docking, Protease Structures, and Bioactivity Data</article-title>
      </title-group>
                    <contrib-group>
                      <contrib contrib-type="author">
              <name>
                <surname>Grant</surname>
                <given-names>Oliver</given-names>
              </name>
                              <xref rid="aff1" ref-type="aff">1</xref>
                                        </contrib>
                      <contrib contrib-type="author">
              <name>
                <surname>Clark</surname>
                <given-names>David</given-names>
              </name>
                              <xref rid="aff1" ref-type="aff">1</xref>
                                                            <xref rid="cor1" ref-type="corresp" />
                          </contrib>
                      <contrib contrib-type="author">
              <name>
                <surname>Nguyen</surname>
                <given-names>Sophia</given-names>
              </name>
                              <xref rid="aff2" ref-type="aff">2</xref>
                                        </contrib>
                  </contrib-group>
                  <aff id="aff1">
            <label>1</label>Department of Pharmaceutical Data Analytics, Faculty of Science and Engineering, University of Glasgow, Glasgow, United Kingdom.
          </aff>
                  <aff id="aff2">
            <label>2</label>Department of Intelligent Drug Systems, Faculty of Pharmacy, National University of Singapore, Singapore.
          </aff>
                          <author-notes>
            <corresp id="cor1">
              <bold>Address for correspondence:</bold> Prof. Wael Abu Dayyih, Department of
              Pharmaceutical Chemistry, Faculty of Pharmacy, Mutah University, Al-Karak 61710, Jordan.
                              E-mail: <email xlink:href="david.clark@gmail.com">david.clark@gmail.com</email>
                          </corresp>
          </author-notes>
                    <pub-date pub-type="epub">
        <day>28</day>
        <month>06</month>
        <year>2025</year>
      </pub-date>
      <volume>16</volume>
      <issue>3</issue>
      <fpage>22</fpage>
      <lpage>31</lpage>
      <permissions>
        <copyright-statement>
          Copyright: &#x000a9; 2026 Pharmacophore
        </copyright-statement>
        <copyright-year>2026</copyright-year>
        <license>
          <ali:license_ref xmlns:ali="http://www.niso.org/schemas/ali/1.0/"
            specific-use="textmining" content-type="ccbyncsalicense">
            https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/</ali:license_ref>
          <license-p>This is an open access journal, and articles are distributed under the terms of
            the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 License, which allows
            others to remix, tweak, and build upon the work non-commercially, as long as appropriate
            credit is given and the new creations are licensed under the identical terms.</license-p>
        </license>
      </permissions>
      <abstract>
        <title>A<sc>BSTRACT</sc></title>
        <p>Antiviral drug discovery targeting viral proteases often begins with structure-based virtual screening, but docking scores alone are unreliable predictors of true biochemical inhibition because they oversimplify complex binding, solvation, and conformational effects. Existing machine learning models typically treat molecular activity as a direct regression or classification target, which can overlook the relational structure among compounds, particularly when docked molecules share interaction patterns yet differ in measured bioactivity. To address these limitations, this article proposes a contrastive molecular learning framework for antiviral hit prioritization, designed to learn an embedding space in which active antiviral compounds cluster near structurally and interactionally similar inhibitors. The model integrates molecular graph encoders, docking-derived interaction fingerprints, protease pocket features, docking scores, and bioactivity labels, using a contrastive objective to bring together compounds with similar activity and interaction profiles while separating inactive or dissimilar molecules. Conceptually, this approach generates a ranked virtual library in which likely antiviral hits are distinguished from docking false positives, with latent space visualization and substructural attribution providing qualitative insight into compound prioritization. By combining binding plausibility with activity-consistent molecular representations, this contrastive framework could enhance the practical utility of virtual screening against viral proteases and reduce unnecessary biochemical testing.</p>
      </abstract>
      <kwd-group>
                <kwd>Contrastive learning</kwd>
                <kwd>Antiviral drug discovery</kwd>
                <kwd>Molecular docking</kwd>
                <kwd>Viral protease</kwd>
                <kwd>Graph neural network</kwd>
                <kwd>Bioactivity</kwd>
              </kwd-group>
    </article-meta>
  </front>
</article>