arXiv AI

TorchCraft: Unified binder design by inverting an all-atom structure predictor

TorchCraft is a unified binder‑design framework that optimizes sequence logits using a frozen all‑atom structure predictor. It integrates confidence, contact, geometric, and sequence‑prior objectives within TorchFold to design minibinders, framework‑conditioned VHHs, cyclic peptides, and ligand‑binding proteins. Using pretrained AlphaFold 3 weights, TorchCraft produced experimentally validated binders across four targets without post‑hoc redesign, and computational tests confirmed its applicability to cyclic peptides and ligand‑conditioned pocket design.

arXiv AI
2d ago

CODesign: Consistency from Data to Trajectory in All-Atom Protein Binder Co-Design

CODesign is a co-design framework that jointly generates protein sequences and structures to improve consistency between them. It introduces a large consistency‑distilled dataset of about 105,000 dimers and employs a multimodal joint flow model with a consistency‑aware resampling strategy to iteratively refine sequences and side chains. The approach achieves state‑of‑the‑art in silico success rates for protein‑ and ligand‑target binder design, with ablation studies showing a 70.9% performance boost from the distilled dataset and further gains from the resampling mechanism.

By Yuanle Mo, Bo Qiang, Haitao Lin, Qinghan Wang, Gang Du, Odin Zhang, Pheng Ann Heng
arXiv AI
Sep 7

NEAT-POCKET: Pocket-Conditioned Autoregressive 3D Molecular Generation with a Neighborhood-Guided Set Transformer

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.

By Roxane Axel Jacob, Daniel Rose, Thierry Langer, Johannes Kirchmair
arXiv Machine Learning
Jul 14

Vilya-1: An all-atom foundation model for macrocycle structure prediction and design

arXiv:2607. 09998v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Macrocyclic peptides are an increasingly important therapeutic modality, but existing computational methods for modeling their structures and properties are limited in scope and do not generalize well across the synthetically accessible chemical space.

By Vilya Research, :, Pascal Sturmfels, Milad Salem, Naozumi Hiranuma, Stephen Rettie, Xiaoliang Pan, Benjamin D. Sellers, Adam P. Moyer, Patrick J. Salveson, Ivan Anishchanka
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 Machine Learning
Jun 30

Inference-time optimization for experiment-grounded protein ensemble generation

arXiv:2602. 24007v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Protein function relies on dynamic conformational ensembles, yet current generative models like AlphaFold3 often fail to produce ensembles that match experimental data.

By Advaith Maddipatla, Anar Rzayev, Marco Pegoraro, Martin Pacesa, Paul Schanda, Ailie Marx, Sanketh Vedula, Alex M. Bronstein
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
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