  Molecular knowledge resides within three different modalities of information
sources: molecular structures, biomedical documents, and knowledge bases.
Effective incorporation of molecular knowledge from these modalities holds
paramount significance in facilitating biomedical research. However, existing
multimodal molecular foundation models exhibit limitations in capturing
intricate connections between molecular structures and texts, and more
importantly, none of them attempt to leverage a wealth of molecular expertise
derived from knowledge graphs. In this study, we introduce MolFM, a multimodal
molecular foundation model designed to facilitate joint representation learning
from molecular structures, biomedical texts, and knowledge graphs. We propose
cross-modal attention between atoms of molecular structures, neighbors of
molecule entities and semantically related texts to facilitate cross-modal
comprehension. We provide theoretical analysis that our cross-modal
pre-training captures local and global molecular knowledge by minimizing the
distance in the feature space between different modalities of the same
molecule, as well as molecules sharing similar structures or functions. MolFM
achieves state-of-the-art performance on various downstream tasks. On
cross-modal retrieval, MolFM outperforms existing models with 12.13% and 5.04%
absolute gains under the zero-shot and fine-tuning settings, respectively.
Furthermore, qualitative analysis showcases MolFM's implicit ability to provide
grounding from molecular substructures and knowledge graphs. Code and models
are available on https://github.com/BioFM/OpenBioMed.
