TopU-LBVS is a new multi‑target benchmark for ligand‑based virtual screening that addresses shortcomings of existing datasets by using hard‑negative decoys and a fixed 1:40 active‑to‑decoy ratio. It covers 93 protein targets across seven classes, provides three evaluation protocols (full, low‑data, and mini), and includes curated ChEMBL‑35 bioactivity data with property‑matched, structurally similar decoys. The benchmark demonstrates that performance drops sharply when moving from random‑decoy to hard‑negative evaluation, and it releases data, splits, code, and baseline implementations for reproducible comparison.
By Surbhi Kumar, Yuhe Zhou, Varun Shiralkar, Niu Huang, Baris Coskunuzer
TopU-LBVS is a new multi‑target benchmark for ligand‑based virtual screening that addresses shortcomings of previous datasets by using hard‑negative decoys and a fixed 1:40 active‑to‑decoy ratio. It covers 93 protein targets across seven classes, provides three evaluation protocols (full, low‑data, and mini), and includes curated ChEMBL‑35 bioactivity data with property‑matched, structurally similar decoys to reduce shortcut learning. The benchmark comes with released data, fixed splits, evaluation code, and baseline implementations for reproducible comparison of LBVS and molecular representation methods.
arXiv:2608.30175v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Peptide-protein affinity models are often evaluated with a single data split, obscuring whether they interpolate among measurements for observed target...
By Jiaxin Tian, Darren An, Jun Li
CaliPPer is a post‑hoc framework that calibrates and predicts the performance of binding‑prediction models by combining a multi‑chain Sample‑to‑Domain Distance (S2DD) metric with distance‑aware Bayesian recalibration. It operates at three resolutions—generalisability score, aggregate performance prediction, and per‑sample confidence—achieving strong distance‑performance correlations (|r| = 0.80–0.92) and low prediction errors for AUROC, AP, and F1. In retrospective analyses of five published studies, CaliPPer increased true discovery rates, improving AUROC by up to +0.20 on unseen epitopes and variants and raising confirmed neoantigen findings from 0/5 to 3/5.
By Jian-Qing Zheng, Hantao Lou, Zinan Yin, Sam Farrar, Yuze Zhou, Elie Antoun, Xiangxi Wang, Xuetao Cao, Tao Dong
HierDTA is a hierarchical structure‑aware framework for drug–target affinity prediction that represents drugs as atom–motif heterogeneous graphs and proteins as residue interaction graphs. It integrates atom and residue representations via cross‑attention, supplemented by molecule fingerprints and pretrained ESM‑2 embeddings, achieving superior performance on the Davis and KIBA datasets and strong generalization in cold‑start scenarios. Ablation studies and interpretability analyses confirm the contributions of its hierarchical augmentation and interaction components, and case studies demonstrate early enrichment of candidate bioactive compounds.
By Huangchao Xu, Baohua Zhang, Qian Liu, Zhong Jin, Yi Du
The study investigates how different distribution shifts affect the evaluation of drug‑target affinity (DTA) models, using 718,800 drug‑protein pairs from ChEMBL and BindingDB. It compares a baseline Morgan‑fingerprint + protein‑CNN model with 12 architectures that combine four drug representations and three ESM‑2 interaction modes, finding that mean validation RMSE rises significantly under protein‑cluster and dual out‑of‑distribution (OOD) scenarios. Model rankings remain consistent across chemical shifts but diverge under protein and dual OOD, indicating that architecture selection depends on the specific extrapolation context rather than just average error or training‑set size.
Why it matters: The results suggest that DTA benchmarks should be designed to reflect the chemical and target shifts expected in real deployment, ensuring that chosen models perform reliably when applied to new chemical series or protein targets.
By Minjae Chung, Clara Li, Malar Paavai Muthukumaran, Shaunna Wang, Aniket Ramkrishnan Iyer, Shaun Qien Yeau Tan, Harinishree Sathu, Micky C. Nnamdi, J. Ben Tamo, Benoit Louis Marteau, May Dongmei Wang
arXiv:2505. 20346v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Function-guided protein design is a crucial task with significant applications in drug discovery and enzyme engineering.
By Jiahao Kuang, Nuowei Liu, Jie Wang, Changzhi Sun, Tao Ji, Yuanbin Wu
arXiv:2606. 13477v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Supramolecular chemistry, which includes the study of non-covalent host-guest assemblies, has advanced various applications.
By Tianyi Ma, Yijun Ma, Zehong Wang, Weixiang Sun, Ziming Li, Connor R. Schmidt, Chuxu Zhang, Matthew J. Webber, Yanfang Ye
arXiv:2611.00749v2 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: Liquid-phase peptide synthesis (LPPS) offers a scalable route to peptide manufacturing, but route development still depends on empirical solvent sc...
By Alexander Arjun Lobo, Marc Saouda, Urvi Awasthi, Leonid Zhukov
SpecOpt is a new molecular design task that optimizes the binding specificity of existing drugs by making constrained structural modifications. The method uses an agentic framework that docks a compound against its intended target and known off‑targets, compares residue‑aware atom‑protein contacts, and feeds the differential interactions to a large language model to propose changes. On a benchmark of 915 compounds, SpecOpt increased the target‑off‑target binding gap for 84.8% of cases while preserving drug‑like properties and structural similarity.
By Thao Nguyen, Heng Ji
MLIPDiff is an inference‑time guidance technique that enhances pretrained denoising diffusion models for ligand generation by incorporating physics‑informed guidance from a machine‑learned interatomic potential (UMA). It combines four weighted energy terms—protein‑ligand interaction, ligand strain, steric clash, and pocket anchoring—to eliminate protein‑ligand collisions while preserving local geometry, without requiring model retraining. On the CrossDocked2020 benchmark, MLIPDiff produces clash‑free, physically plausible ligand poses and achieves superior binding‑affinity metrics compared to both the base diffusion model and NucleusDiff.
By Yiyan Liao, Amin Tavakoli, Yu Zhang, Anima Anandkumar
SurfSpec is a new framework for lead optimization that improves drug specificity without needing off‑target structures. It works by measuring and reducing the geometric mismatch between a ligand and its target pocket, using the triangle inequality to infer a lower bound on mismatch to off‑target pockets. In tests on the CrossDocked2020 dataset, SurfSpec lowers geometric mismatch and achieves higher empirical specificity while still improving target affinity.
By Minyeong Hwang, Yoorim Gang, Ziseok Lee, Wooyeol Lee, Young Bin Park, Jae-Mun Choi, Kyungsu Kim, Eunho Yang