arXiv AI

NEAT-POCKET: Pocket-Conditioned Autoregressive 3D Molecular Generation with a Neighborhood-Guided Set Transformer

NEAT-POCKET is a pocket‑conditioned extension of the autoregressive NEAT model that generates 3D molecules atom by atom within protein binding pockets, maintaining atom permutation invariance and explicitly modeling hydrogen atoms. It outperforms existing baselines on the CrossDocked and SPINDR datasets, achieving competitive structure‑based generation performance while sampling significantly faster. The model also supports pocket‑conditioned fragment completion, a capability directly useful for lead optimization and scaffold elaboration in drug design.

arXiv AI
Jul 21

Do Language Models Dream of Binding Molecules? Benchmarking LLMs under Spatial Constraints

arXiv:2607. 18144v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Structure-based drug design (SBDD) leverages the 3D structure of protein targets, often complemented by other spatial constraints, to generate candidate binding molecules.

By Thomas MacDougall, Maksim Kuznetsov, Roman Schutski, Rim Shayakhmetov, Maxim Malkov, Vladimir Aladinskiy, Alex Aliper, Alex Zhavoronkov
arXiv AI
Jun 8

ShallowBench: Benchmarking Generative Drug Design Models on Shallow-Pocket Targets

arXiv:2606. 06717v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: While generative AI models have demonstrated remarkable success in structure-based drug design, they predominantly rely on deep binding pockets and struggle to sample effective ligands for challenging low-pocketability targets, such as the historically "undruggable" oncology targets KRAS and MYC.

By Saket Reddy, Shiwei Liu
arXiv Machine Learning
Jul 2

SynLaD: Latent Diffusion for Generating Synthesizable Molecules Conditioned on 3D Pharmacophore Profiles

arXiv:2607. 01105v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We present SynLaD, a latent diffusion framework for small-molecule generation that unifies ligand-based drug design objectives (what to make) with synthetic accessibility (how to make it).

By Miruna Cretu, John Bradshaw, Patricia Suriana, Saeed Saremi, Omar Mahmood, Kirill Shmilovich, Kangway Chuang, Vishnu Sresht, Colin Grambow
arXiv AI
Aug 19

Leveraging generative hallucination and biophysics-informed modeling for unified biomolecular sequence-structure co-design

The paper introduces MCTH (Monte Carlo Tree Hallucination), an inference-only framework that performs all‑atom biomolecular sequence‑structure co‑design by treating pretrained folding and inverse‑folding models as black‑box operators. MCTH uses Monte Carlo Tree Search to allocate a fixed inference budget across competing design trajectories, incorporating model confidence, uncertainty, and cross‑expert consensus. Experiments across protein‑RNA, protein‑DNA, protein‑protein, and protein‑ligand design show that adaptive search outperforms simpler sampling strategies, and evaluations with AlphaFold3 and Chai‑1 demonstrate transferability beyond the search‑time oracle.

By Xuefeng Liu, Mingxuan Cao, Xiao Luo, Songhao Jiang, Tobin Sosnick, Jinbo Xu, Louis Maher, Rick Stevens
arXiv Machine Learning
3d ago

Ensemble-Conditioned Molecular Design

The paper proposes a new framework called ensemble-conditioned guidance that reframes molecular design as an optimisation over both the modes and properties of a molecule’s conformational ensemble. It allows 3D generative models to be conditioned simultaneously on multiple axes—such as shapes, pharmacophore profiles, or protein pockets—by adaptively combining vector fields from each condition. The authors introduce adaptive symmetry learning for composable conditions across reference frames, extend the framework to support flexible-size generation, and demonstrate its effectiveness on new benchmarks and practical drug‑discovery tasks, showing improved outcomes when conditioning on additional states compared to single‑state approaches.

By Ross Irwin, Alessandro Tibo, Jon Paul Janet, Simon Olsson