Centre for AI Driven Drug Discovery at Macao Polytechnic University
We are dedicated to advancing computational biology to improve our understanding of biomolecular systems and accelerate discovery in health and life sciences. We combine biological insight with data-driven methods, including deep learning, large language models, knowledge graphs, and optimization algorithms, to address challenging problems at the interface of computation and biology.
In drug discovery, our research spans method development for peptide and small-molecule drug discovery and property prediction, from target identification to lead discovery. Previous projects have focused on antimicrobial peptides (AMPs), anticancer peptides (ACPs), antioxidant peptides (AOPs), bacterial targets (TxSS), and cancer targets (TROP2 and HER2).
In health sciences, we work on medical imaging diagnosis, with a particular focus on infectious diseases, as well as spatial gene expression prediction for cancer research.
We are proud to share that Jianxiu Cai successfully defended her dissertation on Thursday (Apr 23, 2026). Her work, “Computational Modeling of Peptide Bioactivities Using Sequence-based Deep Learning Architecture”, designed both large and slim deep learning models to address the challenges of peptide activity prediction, generating highly accurate models despite small datasets, high structural flexibility…
Congratulations to Xiangyu on the publication of the new work in Engineering Applications of Artificial Intelligence! In this paper, the team proposes CrossToGene, a bidirectional cross-modality interaction framework for predicting spatial gene expression from histopathological images. The method introduces spatial encoding to capture both macro/micro tissue cues, a bidirectional cross-modal interaction module for stronger fusion…
Congratulations to Xinpo Lou on the publication of his two recent works in Journal of Chemical Information and Modeling and Journal of Cheminformatics! The proposed MambaTransDTA model introduces a novel hybrid Mamba–Transformer architecture for drug–target binding affinity prediction. By effectively combining long-range dependency modeling with local interaction learning, the model achieves strong and consistent performance…