arXiv Machine Learning

MLIPDiff: Guiding Denoising Diffusion Models for Structure-Based Drug Design via Machine-Learned Interatomic Potentials

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.

arXiv AI
Oct 7

Inference-Time Projection for Physically Valid Biomolecular Diffusion Models

The paper introduces two closed‑form projection operators that enforce physical validity in biomolecular diffusion models during inference. One operator resolves inter‑chain van der Waals clashes, while the other restores ligand geometry, including bond lengths, angles, planarity, and chirality. These lightweight, model‑agnostic corrections preserve structural accuracy and ligand placement across multiple benchmarks without adding runtime or memory overhead.

By Qurat-ul-ain, Yee Whye Teh, Charlotte M. Deane, Matteo Cagiada
arXiv AI
Oct 21

HierDTA: Hierarchical Structure-Aware Representation Learning for Drug--Target Affinity Prediction

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
arXiv Machine Learning
Jul 15

Generating Developable 3D Molecules via Pocket-Conditioned Diffusion and Property-Aware Optimization

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.

By Ruoxi Gao, Jiangweizhi Peng, Ziqi Chen, Frazier N. Baker, David C. Kombo, John L. Kane Jr., Andrew A. Scholte, Yi Li, Matthew J. LaMarche, Luigi I. Iconaru, Hans-Peter Biemann, Mingyi Hong, Xia Ning
arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 5

An accurate nucleic acid-small molecule docking framework via geometric deep learning with large-scale pretraining

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.

By Shi Li (College of Pharmaceutical Sciences, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, Zhejiang, P. R. China), Xujun Zhang (College of Pharmaceutical Sciences, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, Zhejiang, P. R. China), Mingquan Liu (Faculty of Health Sciences, University of Macau, Macau SAR, China), Hui Zhang (College of Pharmaceutical Sciences, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, Zhejiang, P. R. China, Shanghai Innovation Institute, Shanghai, China), Shuoying Jia (College of Pharmaceutical Sciences, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, Zhejiang, P. R. China, Shanghai Innovation Institute, Shanghai, China), Yu Kang (College of Pharmaceutical Sciences, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, Zhejiang, P. R. China, Shanghai Innovation Institute, Shanghai, China), Tingjun Hou (College of Pharmaceutical Sciences, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, Zhejiang, P. R. China, Zhejiang Provincial Key Laboratory for Intelligent Drug Discovery and Development, Jinhua Institute of Zhejiang University, Zhejiang, China), Peichen Pan (College of Pharmaceutical Sciences, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, Zhejiang, P. R. China, Zhejiang Provincial Key Laboratory for Intelligent Drug Discovery and Development, Jinhua Institute of Zhejiang University, Zhejiang, China)
arXiv Machine Learning
Jul 7

FastCSP: Accelerated Molecular Crystal Structure Prediction with Universal Model for Atoms

arXiv:2508. 02641v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Molecular crystal structure prediction (CSP) is essential for applications in pharmaceuticals and organic electronics.

By Vahe Gharakhanyan, Yi Yang, Luis Barroso-Luque, Daniel S. Levine, Sushree Jagriti Sahoo, Brandon M. Wood, Kyle Michel, Muhammed Shuaibi, Gregory J. O. Beran, Viachaslau Bernat, Misko Dzamba, Xiang Fu, Meng Gao, Xingyu Liu, Benjamin K. Miller, Keian Noori, Lafe J. Purvis, Tingling Rao, Ammar Rizvi, Matt Uyttendaele, Andrew J. Ouderkirk, Chiara Daraio, C. Lawrence Zitnick, Arman Boromand, Noa Marom, Zachary W. Ulissi, Anuroop Sriram
arXiv Machine Learning
Jul 28

MolCryst-MLIPs: A Machine-Learned Interatomic Potentials Database for Molecular Crystals

arXiv:2604. 13897v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We present an open Molecular Crystal (MC) database of Machine-Learned Interatomic Potentials (MLIP) called MolCryst-MLIPs.

By Adam Lahouari, Shen Ai, Jihye Han, Jillian Hoffstadt, Philipp Hoellmer, Charlotte Infante, Pulkita Jain, Sangram Kadam, Maya M. Martirossyan, Amara McCune, Hypatia Newton, Shlok J. Paul, Willmor Pena, Jonathan Raghoonanan, Sumon Sahu, Oliver Tan, Andrea Vergara, Jutta Rogal, Mark E. Tuckerman
arXiv AI
Jun 8

ShallowBench: Benchmarking Generative Drug Design Models on Shallow-Pocket Targets

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.

By Saket Reddy, Shiwei Liu
arXiv AI
Aug 19

Leveraging generative hallucination and biophysics-informed modeling for unified biomolecular sequence-structure co-design

The paper introduces MCTH (Monte Carlo Tree Hallucination), an inference-only framework that performs all‑atom biomolecular sequence‑structure co‑design by treating pretrained folding and inverse‑folding models as black‑box operators. MCTH uses Monte Carlo Tree Search to allocate a fixed inference budget across competing design trajectories, incorporating model confidence, uncertainty, and cross‑expert consensus. Experiments across protein‑RNA, protein‑DNA, protein‑protein, and protein‑ligand design show that adaptive search outperforms simpler sampling strategies, and evaluations with AlphaFold3 and Chai‑1 demonstrate transferability beyond the search‑time oracle.

By Xuefeng Liu, Mingxuan Cao, Xiao Luo, Songhao Jiang, Tobin Sosnick, Jinbo Xu, Louis Maher, Rick Stevens