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.
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.
arXiv:2606. 01461v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Developing effective anticancer therapeutics remains challenging due to tumor heterogeneity and the absence of well-defined molecular targets across cancer subtypes.
arXiv:2606. 23856v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Generative molecular models for drug design are a promising direction with much active research.
arXiv:2607. 01105v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We present SynLaD, a latent diffusion framework for small-molecule generation that unifies ligand-based drug design objectives (what to make) with synthetic accessibility (how to make it).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
PocketVE is a protein-pocket-conditioned variance‑exploding diffusion framework that integrates stable 3D coordinate denoising, classifier‑free property guidance, and adaptive protein perturbation. It improves 3D validity from 58.6% to 80.6% and reduces strain energy from 457.4 to 127.9 on CrossDocked2020 while maintaining competitive docking and property scores. The study shows moderate guidance balances target objectives with geometric quality, and diagnostics confirm enhanced pocket compatibility.
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.
SurfSpec is a new framework for lead optimization that improves drug specificity without needing off‑target structures. It works by measuring and reducing the geometric mismatch between a ligand and its target pocket, using the triangle inequality to infer a lower bound on mismatch to off‑target pockets. In tests on the CrossDocked2020 dataset, SurfSpec lowers geometric mismatch and achieves higher empirical specificity while still improving target affinity.