DREAM-B3P: Dual-Stream Transformer Network Enhanced by Feedback Diffusion Model for Blood-Brain Barrier Penetrating Peptide Prediction

Introduction: The blood-brain barrier (BBB) protects the central nervous system but prevents most neurotherapeutics from reaching effective concentrations in the brain. BBB-penetrating peptides (BBBPs) offer a promising strategy for brain drug delivery; however, the scarcity of positive samples and severe class imbalance hinder the reliable identification of BBBPs. Objectives: Our goal is to alleviate class imbalance in BBBP prediction and to develop an accurate, interpretable classifier for BBBP prediction. Methods: We propose DREAM-B3P, which couples a feedback diffusion model (FB-Diffusion) for data augmentation with a dual-stream Transformer for classification. FB-Diffusion learns the BBBP distribution via iterative denoising and uses an external analyzer to provide feedback, generating high-quality pseudo-BBBPs. The classifier contains a sequence stream that extracts structural features from peptide sequences and a physicochemical stream that captures physicochemical features such as hydrophobic surface area, molecular charge, number of rotatable bonds, and polarizability. Combining the two features leads to superior BBBP predictive performance. Results: On a benchmark test set containing equal numbers of BBBPs and non-BBBPs, DREAM-B3P surpasses baseline methods (Deep-B3P, B3Pred, BBPpredict and Augur), improving AUC/ACC/MCC by 4.3\%/17.8\%/14.9\%, respectively, over the second-best method. Conclusion: By integrating feedback diffusion with a dual-stream Transformer classifier, DREAM-B3P effectively mitigates data scarcity and imbalance and achieves state-of-the-art performance.