arXiv:2608. 07609v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: High-throughput screening (HTS) assays are central to early-stage drug discovery but are often limited by extreme data sparsity, as primary screens typically use only a single replicate per test substance.
arXiv:2608. 12219v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Treating patients with combinations of drugs reduces the risk of resistance to any individual drug.
The paper introduces a framework to predict whether a compound’s potency can be quantified in dose‑response profiling, treating quantifiability as a separate triage goal from biological activity. It shows that features from low‑cost primary screens, rather than molecular structure, strongly predict quantifiability, and that this prediction holds across new chemical scaffolds and assay families. The authors argue that incorporating quantifiability predictions can better allocate expensive dose‑response resources.
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.
The study evaluates the use of default decision thresholds (t=0.50) in multi‑label enzyme commission (EC) number prediction across 14,096 compounds and six EC classes. It finds a high mean accuracy of 77.16% but low macro F1 (0.3976) and macro recall (0.3872), indicating severe class‑imbalance issues: majority classes are over‑predicted while minority classes, especially EC6, have zero recall despite reasonable ROC‑AUC. The authors recommend target‑specific threshold tuning and conformal calibration as post‑processing safeguards to expose and correct these hidden errors.
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: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.
The study benchmarks active spot selection methods against random sampling for spatial transcriptomics, focusing on cost‑efficient data acquisition. Using two public cohorts, the authors simulate multi‑round selection with uncertainty‑based (MC‑dropout, TOD) and diversity‑based (CoreSet, TypiClust) strategies, evaluating performance at 5%, 10%, 30%, and 50% of the spot pool. Results show that none of the active strategies consistently outperforms random sampling across all budgets or evaluation metrics, with performance varying by dataset and metric.
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.
arXiv:2606. 28659v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: High-fidelity molecular docking simulations can produce biologically relevant estimates of epitope-receptor binding affinity but are computationally expensive and therefore limit the number of candidates that can be screened for vaccine design.
arXiv:2606. 14823v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Genetic evidence is enriched among approved drug targets: in an observational analysis of 26,278 target-disease pairs from Open Targets and ChEMBL, targets with any genetic association had a 3.
The study evaluates whether a portfolio of compact, semantically named descriptor blocks can match the performance of a 2048‑dimensional CheMeleon embedding in low‑data molecular assays. Using a fixed 11‑dimensional physicochemical base and greedily adding provenance‑screened blocks, the portfolio achieves a mean test AUC of 0.762 across nine ADME/Tox assays, comparable to CheMeleon’s 0.764 and better than Mordred’s 0.756. The results meet a predeclared pooled parity threshold but not all per‑assay thresholds, and further analysis confirms the competitiveness of the auditable representation while highlighting unresolved assay‑level differences.
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.