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.
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.
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: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.
arXiv:2606. 14159v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Protein-ligand binding affinity (PLA) prediction is critical in drug discovery.
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. 00666v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Transition metal complexes are central to catalysis, drug design, and materials science, with relevant properties strongly sensitive to their three-dimensional geometry.
arXiv:2606. 14217v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Accurate prediction of protein-ligand binding affinity is essential for structure-based drug discovery.
arXiv:2607. 17412v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: A hallmark of neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer's and Parkinson's is the aberrant aggregation of proteins into amyloid fibrils, and small molecules that selectively bind to these fibrils hold promise as diagnostics, imaging probes, and therapeutics.
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.
The paper introduces PIFT, a framework that transfers peptide‑target interaction patterns to small molecules by jointly guiding masked discrete diffusion and continuous flow matching. PIFT maps peptide‑target and small‑molecule‑target interfaces into a shared, target‑conditioned interaction space, enabling peptide‑derived references to steer both building‑block logits and 3D coordinates toward peptide‑compatible molecules while maintaining a strong molecular prior. Experiments on diverse protein‑protein interaction targets demonstrate that this cross‑modal representation improves interface recovery, docking performance, and molecular properties.