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
arXiv:2606. 00008v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Multi-objective molecular optimization requires searching vast chemical spaces under conflicting objectives, where early design decisions strongly constrain downstream outcomes.
By Jia Zhang, Tengfei Ma, Tianle Li, Daojian Zeng, Xieping Gao, Xiangxiang Zeng
arXiv:2602.00663v3 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: Optimizing molecules to achieve desired properties is a central bottleneck across the chemical sciences, particularly in the pharmaceutical industr...
By Fabian P. Kr\"uger, Andrea Hunklinger, Adrian Wolny, Tim J. Adler, Igor Tetko, Santiago David Villalba
arXiv:2502. 18966v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: General chemical reaction conditions that achieve consistently high performance across multiple substrates are important for practical applications such as library synthesis and high-throughput experimentation.
By Stefan P. Schmid, Ella Miray Rajaonson, Cher Tian Ser, Mohammad Haddadnia, Shi Xuan Leong, Al\'an Aspuru-Guzik, Agustinus Kristiadi, Kjell Jorner, Felix Strieth-Kalthoff
M3OS is a multi‑agent large‑language‑model system that separates molecular‑design reasoning from optimization‑state management using a Monte Carlo graph search. The system maintains a persistent graph of evaluated candidates, transformations, and evidence, while LLM agents use role‑specific contexts to generate and edit molecules with tool‑driven and knowledge‑guided approaches. Across three benchmarks, M3OS outperforms baselines, demonstrating the benefit of persistent search state, specialized agents, and controlled execution for multi‑constraint molecular optimization.
arXiv:2606. 11256v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Designing molecules with target properties is most useful when candidate structures are accompanied by feasible synthetic routes.
By C\'esar Ojeda, Darius A. Faroughy, Maryam Karimi, Payam Zarrintaj, Mir Mehdi Seyedebrahimi, Mart\'in Carballo-Pacheco
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:2604.07669v3 Announce Type: replace-cross
Abstract: Synthesizable molecular optimization seeks to improve target properties while ensuring that molecular modifications follow feasible synthetic...
By Tao Li, Kaiyuan Hou, Tuan Vinh, Fanglei Xue, Monika Raj, Zhichun Guo, Carl Yang
arXiv:2509. 26405v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We introduce InVirtuoGen, a discrete flow generative model for fragmented SMILES for de novo and fragment-constrained generation, and target-property/lead optimization of small molecules.
By Benno Kaech, Luis Wyss, Karsten Borgwardt, Gianvito Grasso
MolDesignBench is a new benchmark for evaluating large language model (LLM)-based agents in scenario‑grounded molecular design. It contains 2,000 generation and optimization tasks that blend implicit narrative requirements with explicit property and functional‑group constraints, including infeasible cases, and require the use of 17 specialized chemistry tools. Experiments with leading LLMs show low success rates (best ~43%) and highlight failures in implicit‑constraint reasoning, infeasibility detection, and tool usage, underscoring the benchmark’s role in identifying key bottlenecks for future research.
By Yongjun Jeong, Hanbum Ko, Ye Rin Kim, Chanhui Lee, Rodrigo Hormazabal, Jaewan Lee, Sehui Han, Sungbin Lim, Sungwoong Kim
arXiv:2606. 19245v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Artificial intelligence (AI) agents promise to accelerate drug discovery by compressing interpretation and decision-making loops, but practical deployment requires trusted evaluation on realistic program decisions.
By Hannah Le, Ramesh Ramasamy, Alex Urrutia, Mahsa Yazdani, Tim Proctor, Kenny Workman