ProbeMatchDTI is a new framework for drug‑target interaction prediction that uses probe‑driven pattern matching to preserve weak biochemical signals. It introduces IterProbe, which retains contextual states across refinement depths and selects them with learnable probes, and BindingProbe, which models drug‑protein complementarity at both local and whole‑pair levels. Experiments show that ProbeMatchDTI outperforms existing methods, improving AUC‑ROC by 2.0% on BindingDB and 0.5% on DrugBank, and its predictions can be integrated into downstream drug‑discovery workflows.
By Quan Hao, Mengyue Fan, Zifan Dong, Youru Li, Jianduo Zhao, Lechuan Xu, Hao Zhang, Fei Xia, Jigang Wang, Chong Qiu, Liguo Zhang
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
arXiv:2608. 11444v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Drug response prediction (DRP) models are an active area of research in pharmacogenomics, with growing potential to accelerate the identification of effective anticancer drugs.
By Vincent Lavelle, Yitan Zhu, Kaitlyn Marlor, Thomas Brettin, Rick Stevens
ProbeMatchDTI introduces a probe-driven framework for drug‑target interaction prediction that preserves weak biochemical signals by using IterProbe to retain contextual states and BindingProbe to model cross‑entity complementarity at multiple scales. The method improves AUC‑ROC by 2.0% on BindingDB and 0.5% on DrugBank compared to prior biochemical representation learning approaches. Feature‑level analyses confirm the effectiveness of the probe-driven pattern matching, and the predictions are linked to an evidence‑guided downstream drug‑discovery workflow for candidate refinement and validation planning.
arXiv:2512.09365v2 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: Predicting molecule-protein interactions (MPIs) is a fundamental task in computational biology, with crucial applications in drug discovery and mol...
By Jiayu Qin, Zhengquan Luo, Guy Tadmor, Changyou Chen, David Zeevi, Zhiqiang Xu
arXiv:2605.11221v2 Announce Type: replace-cross
Abstract: Predictive models in medicinal chemistry depend on structured assay data locked in primary publications. This bottleneck is acute in targeted...
By Yaochen Rao, Farzaneh Jalalypour, N. M. Anoop Krishnan, Roc\'io Mercado
arXiv:2607. 08404v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Current computational approaches for drug design typically focus on generating molecules conditioned on specific targets or general molecular properties, often neglecting the influence of disease context on target behavior and therapeutic outcomes.
By Ali Motahharynia, Mohammadreza Ghaffarzadeh-Esfahani, Mahsa Sheikholeslami, Navid Mazrouei, Matin Irajpour, Yousof Gheisari, Hajar Sirous
arXiv:2608. 13797v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Computational approaches to drug discovery involve multiple sub-problems, and among them, drug-target binding affinity prediction plays an important role.
By Jafin Khan, Md Hossain Shuvo
arXiv:2506. 13196v5 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Accurate prediction of protein-ligand binding affinity is critical for drug discovery.
By Han Liu, Keyan Ding, Peilin Chen, Yinwei Wei, Liqiang Nie, Dapeng Wu, Shiqi Wang
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
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:2606. 07698v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Graph neural networks (GNNs) applied to drug-drug interaction (DDI) prediction rely exclusively on molecular structure encoded as SMILES-derived graphs.
By Juergen Dietrich