SurfSpec is a lead‑optimization framework that improves drug specificity without needing off‑target structures. By measuring and reducing the geometric mismatch between a ligand and its target pocket, SurfSpec provides a conservative lower bound on specificity against geometrically separated off‑target pockets. The method iteratively grows ligands toward under‑occupied target surface patches, alternating between linker generation and refinement, and demonstrates superior empirical specificity on the CrossDocked2020 test set while maintaining competitive target affinity.
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:2606. 00555v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Structure-based drug design increasingly employs LLM agents to iteratively refine ligands against a target pocket, yet a viable ligand must satisfy two often-conflicting objectives -- binding affinity and druggability -- which single optimization steps rarely improve together.
By Zaifei Yang, Weiyu Chen, Yaqing Wang, James Kwok
PMO-Dock introduces a standardized benchmark for docking‑based molecular optimization, comprising 25 tasks that span hit generation, lead optimization, and a specificity task that rewards strong on‑target binding while penalizing off‑target interactions. The protocol separates model development from final evaluation, using validation tasks for hyperparameter tuning and held‑out test tasks evaluated under a strict oracle budget to mimic realistic drug‑discovery constraints. Four diverse methods—Saturn, GenMol, Genetic‑guided GFlowNet, and ChemLlama—were benchmarked, revealing no single method dominates across all tasks and highlighting limited hyperparameter transferability, which underscores the need for method‑dependent selection strategies.
By Gor Simonyan, Tatevik Abrahamyan, Narek Abelyan, Tigran Fahradyan, Hrant Khachatrian
Drug discovery and development is time-consuming and resource-intensive, motivating computational approaches such as diffusion models for de novo drug design. Many such models follow the structure-based drug design (SBDD) paradigm, generating molecules to fit a target binding pocket.
FuseDiff is an end‑to‑end diffusion model designed for dual‑target structure‑based drug design, jointly generating a ligand graph and two pocket‑specific binding poses conditioned on both target pockets. It employs a message‑passing backbone with Dual‑target Local Context Fusion (DLCF) to fuse ligand atom contexts from both pockets, preserving symmetry while enabling expressive joint modeling. The model enforces topological consistency across the two poses and allows target‑specific geometric adaptation, achieving state‑of‑the‑art docking performance and enabling systematic assessment of dual‑target pose quality before docking‑based pose search.
By Jianliang Wu, Anjie Qiao, Zhen Wang, Zhewei Wei, Sheng Chen
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
arXiv:2608. 11483v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Hit-to-lead optimization requires iterative design of hit analogs across competing potency, selectivity, physicochemical, pharmacokinetic, safety, and synthetic constraints.
By Kelvin P. Idanwekhai, Enes Kelestemur, Benjamin Strickland, Matthew Hart, Steini Davidsson, Angelos Angelopoulos, Ron Alterovitz, Marcello DeLuca, Alexander Tropsha
arXiv:2607. 19237v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Designing small molecule ligands that bind with high affinity to specific protein pockets is a fundamental goal in drug discovery, as small molecules constitute a major fraction of approved therapeutics.
By Yiming Qin, Kai Yi, Miruna Cretu, Sjors H. W. Scheres, Pietro Li\`o, Pascal Frossard
arXiv:2607. 12349v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Drug discovery and development is time-consuming and resource-intensive, motivating computational approaches such as diffusion models for de novo drug design.
By Ruoxi Gao, Jiangweizhi Peng, Ziqi Chen, Frazier N. Baker, David C. Kombo, John L. Kane Jr., Andrew A. Scholte, Yi Li, Matthew J. LaMarche, Luigi I. Iconaru, Hans-Peter Biemann, Mingyi Hong, Xia Ning
PepEVOLVE is a dynamic, position‑aware framework for optimizing macrocyclic peptides that learns where to edit and how to improve multiple properties. It enhances pretraining with dynamic masking and CHUCKLES shifting, employs a multi‑armed‑bandit router to identify high‑reward residues, and uses an evolving optimization algorithm with group‑relative advantage to stabilize updates. In in‑silico tests on a Rev‑binding macrocycle benchmark, PepEVOLVE surpassed PepINVENT, achieving higher permeability‑weighted scores and converging faster while respecting structural constraints.
By Trieu Nguyen, Hao-Wei Pang, Shasha Feng
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