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
Drug synergy prediction estimates whether two drugs produce a stronger joint effect than expected from their individual activities. For drug combination discovery, a single synergy score is often not...
VINCENT is a post‑training framework that provides validated, chemically coherent explanations for drug synergy predictions by extracting atom‑pair evidence from attention and gradient signals, grouping them into motifs, and refining these motifs through repeated local perturbations. On a literature‑annotated subset of 25 drug pairs, VINCENT achieves a mean motif recall of 0.826, outperforming baselines (0.49–0.66). Across 71 test pairs, its validated interaction scores yield a TP/TN separation of 3.36, indicating more accurate recovery of literature‑supported molecular regions and better alignment with predictor behavior.
By Fan-Sheng Chuang, Xuchen Li, Yujing Bian, Kaixiong Zhou
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
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: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
Monroe is a new molecular foundation model that improves upon existing models by pre‑training on over 81 million molecules from the PM6 quantum chemistry dataset, enhancing stereochemistry representation, and introducing novel training losses such as conformer denoising and embedding decorrelation. It also incorporates a prior‑data‑fitted model (TabPFN) for downstream in‑context prediction and demonstrates superior performance on Polaris benchmarks and activity cliff tests. Ablation studies show that the PFN‑based downstream approach can upgrade other models, producing state‑of‑the‑art variants MiniMol_PFN and CheMeleon_PFN.
By Blazej Banaszewski, Andrew W. Fitzgibbon
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. 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:2609.37384v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Molecular representation learning is central to computer-aided drug discovery. Molecular graphs, SMILES strings, and 3D conformations provide complemen...
By Linqing Mo, Jiayu Zhou, Bin Chen
arXiv:2607. 17601v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Accurate protein-ligand binding affinity prediction is central to computational drug discovery, yet modern docking engines frequently disagree without indicating which prediction to trust.
By Yongchan Hong, Defu Cao, Wenjin Liu, Thomas Ku, Jordy Homing Lam, Emily Nguyen, Willie Neiswanger, Vsevolod Katritch, Yan Liu