Matcha is a new molecular docking method that refines ligand poses through three flow-matching stages—translation, rotation, and torsion—before applying GNINA for minimization, filtering, and ranking. It achieves high physical plausibility and is approximately 28 times faster than current large-scale co‑folding models, outperforming existing benchmarks. The authors provide code, benchmarking artifacts, and model checkpoints on GitHub and Zenodo.
arXiv:2506. 14488v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Structure-based drug design (SBDD) models are central to modern pharmaceutical research, enabling the rational exploration of protein-ligand interactions at atomic resolution.
The paper introduces a curriculum learning strategy for generative flexible docking, a task that predicts protein‑ligand complex configurations from an apo protein structure and a ligand SMILES string. By gradually incorporating examples with large conformational changes during training, the authors enhance an existing generative model, achieving a 46.52% top‑1 success rate on the PDBBind ESMFold apo benchmark and outperforming prior baselines. The approach leverages diffusion and flow‑based generative models to model the posterior distribution over ligand poses and protein conformations conditioned on the apo input.
arXiv:2512. 02328v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Selecting an effective docking algorithm is highly context-dependent, and no single method performs reliably across structural, chemical, and protocol regimes.
arXiv:2608.20366v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Molecular docking requires reasoning jointly about ligand pose and protein flexibility. Most diffusion-based docking models predict torsional updates...
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.
arXiv:2606. 06717v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: While generative AI models have demonstrated remarkable success in structure-based drug design, they predominantly rely on deep binding pockets and struggle to sample effective ligands for challenging low-pocketability targets, such as the historically "undruggable" oncology targets KRAS and MYC.
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.
NEAT-POCKET is a pocket‑conditioned extension of the autoregressive NEAT model that generates 3D molecules atom by atom within protein binding pockets, maintaining atom permutation invariance and explicitly modeling hydrogen atoms. It outperforms existing baselines on the CrossDocked and SPINDR datasets, achieving competitive structure‑based generation performance while sampling significantly faster. The model also supports pocket‑conditioned fragment completion, a capability directly useful for lead optimization and scaffold elaboration in drug design.
arXiv:2607. 03787v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Accurately modeling biomolecular interactions is a central bottleneck in biology and therapeutic discovery.
arXiv:2606. 11243v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: De novo protein generation has transformative potential in therapeutic design, enzyme engineering, and synthetic biology.
arXiv:2606. 05198v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Nucleic acids are increasingly recognized as therapeutic targets beyond conventional protein-centered drug discovery, yet accurate and efficient docking of small molecules to nucleic acid structures remains challenging.
MLIPDiff is an inference‑time guidance technique that enhances pretrained denoising diffusion models for ligand generation by incorporating physics‑informed guidance from a machine‑learned interatomic potential (UMA). It combines four weighted energy terms—protein‑ligand interaction, ligand strain, steric clash, and pocket anchoring—to eliminate protein‑ligand collisions while preserving local geometry, without requiring model retraining. On the CrossDocked2020 benchmark, MLIPDiff produces clash‑free, physically plausible ligand poses and achieves superior binding‑affinity metrics compared to both the base diffusion model and NucleusDiff.