LMDTA: Molecular Pre-trained and Interaction Fine-tuned Attention Neural Network for Drug-Target Affinity Prediction

Accurately predicting drug-target binding affinity is crucial for advancing drug discovery. Recent molecular pre-training models and biological large models provide general molecular representations, but effectively leveraging these features for specific tasks like Drug-Target Affinity (DTA) prediction remains challenging. To address this, we propose LMDTA, a novel attention-based neural network combining molecular pre-training with interaction fine-tuning for affinity prediction. LMDTA learns complex drug and protein representations through pre-trained models, while fine-tuning an interaction-specific model for the DTA task. The two-side attention mechanism integrates pre-trained and fine-tuned features, capturing key drug-target interactions. Experiments on benchmark datasets show LMDTA achieves state-of-the-art performance, with ablation studies validating the model’s design.