The paper introduces DPTM‑DT, a dual‑pretrained Transformer framework that integrates GROVER molecular graph embeddings, ESM protein language‑model embeddings, and CTD physicochemical descriptors for drug‑target prediction. It employs bidirectional cross‑modal attention to share drug‑target information and uses a single pair representation for continuous affinity regression, high‑affinity binary classification, and six‑level affinity classification. Experiments on Davis and KIBA datasets show that DPTM‑DT outperforms existing methods across regression, binary, and multiclass tasks, with ablation studies confirming the contributions of dual target representation, gated fusion, and cross‑modal attention.
By Ge Kong
arXiv:2608. 19906v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Accurately ranking active ligands for a target protein pocket from massive chemical libraries remains a central challenge in virtual screening.
By Jia-Qi Lin, Yinghua Yao, Chang-Dong Wang, Yew-Soon Ong, Yuangang Pan
The paper introduces ReGeoDTA, a framework that preserves chemical heterogeneity and continuous geometric relationships in drug and protein representations to improve drug–target affinity prediction. Experiments on three benchmark datasets show that maintaining representation fidelity consistently enhances predictive accuracy across various DTA architectures, while degrading representations harms performance and cannot be recovered by more complex downstream models. The study highlights representation fidelity as a key upstream design principle for accurate and generalizable affinity prediction.
By Yixiao Li, Yining Qian, Yefan Chen, Zenghui Chen, Jiayue Sun, Yuhai Zhao, Cheng Tan, An-Yang Lu
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
arXiv:2604. 26498v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The rapid growth of molecular foundation models and large language models (LLMs) has encouraged a scale centred view of AI in drug discovery, in which larger pretrained models are expected to supersede compact cheminformatics models.
By Jinjiang Guo, Sheng Ding
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
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.
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.
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
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
arXiv:2606. 14245v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Drug-target interaction (DTI) and affinity (DTA) predictors increasingly achieve strong benchmark scores, yet their internal use of sequence, fingerprint, and graph features often remains opaque.
By Ali Vefghi, Zahed Rahmati, Mohammad Akbari
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