TITAN-BBB: Predicting BBB Permeability using Multi-Modal Deep-Learning Models

Computational prediction of blood-brain barrier (BBB) permeability has emerged as a vital alternative to traditional experimental assays, which are often resource-intensive and low-throughput to meet the demands of early-stage drug discovery. While early machine learning approaches have shown promise, integration of traditional chemical descriptors with deep learning embeddings remains an underexplored frontier. In this paper, we introduce TITAN-BBB, a multi-modal deep-learning architecture that utilizes tabular, image, and text-based features and combines them using attention mechanisms. To evaluate, we aggregated multiple literature sources to create the largest BBB permeability dataset to date, enabling robust training for both classification and regression tasks. Our results demonstrate that TITAN-BBB achieves 86.5% of balanced accuracy on classification tasks and 0.436 of mean absolute error for regression, outperforming the state-of-the-art by 3.1 percentage points in balanced accuracy and reducing the regression error by 20%. Our approach also outperforms state-of-the-art models in both classification and regression performance, demonstrating the benefits of combining deep and domain-specific representations. The source code is publicly available at https://github.com/pcdslab/TITAN-BBB. The inference-ready model is hosted on Hugging Face at https://huggingface.co/SaeedLab/TITAN-BBB, and the aggregated BBB permeability datasets are available at https://huggingface.co/datasets/SaeedLab/BBBP.