arXiv Machine Learning

READ: A Retrieval-Alignment Diffusion Framework for Structure-based Drug Design

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 AI
Jul 21

Do Language Models Dream of Binding Molecules? Benchmarking LLMs under Spatial Constraints

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.

By Thomas MacDougall, Maksim Kuznetsov, Roman Schutski, Rim Shayakhmetov, Maxim Malkov, Vladimir Aladinskiy, Alex Aliper, Alex Zhavoronkov
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 10

FuseDiff: Symmetry-Preserving Joint Diffusion for Dual-Target Structure-Based Drug Design

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.

By Jianliang Wu, Anjie Qiao, Zhen Wang, Zhewei Wei, Sheng Chen
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 AI
Sep 15

Chemical and geometric representation fidelity improves drug--target affinity prediction

The paper introduces ReGeoDTA, a framework that preserves chemical heterogeneity and continuous geometric relationships in drug and protein representations to improve drug–target affinity prediction. Experiments on three benchmark datasets show that maintaining representation fidelity consistently enhances predictive accuracy across various DTA architectures, while degrading representations harms performance and cannot be recovered by more complex downstream models. The study highlights representation fidelity as a key upstream design principle for accurate and generalizable affinity prediction.

By Yixiao Li, Yining Qian, Yefan Chen, Zenghui Chen, Jiayue Sun, Yuhai Zhao, Cheng Tan, An-Yang Lu
arXiv AI
Sep 21

SpecOpt: Contact-Diff Reasoning for Agentic Molecule Optimization Toward Binding Specificity

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 Machine Learning
Jul 16

HEDGEHOG: Hierarchical Evaluation of Drug Generators Through Rigorous Filtration

arXiv:2607. 13155v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Generative molecular models can support early drug discovery by proposing new candidate compounds de novo.

By Daria A. Ryabchenko (Ligand Pro, Moscow, Russia, Skolkovo Institute of Science and Technology, Artificial Intelligence Center, Moscow, Russia), Pavel Gurevich (Ligand Pro, Moscow, Russia, Skolkovo Institute of Science and Technology, Artificial Intelligence Center, Moscow, Russia), Shamil Kadyrov (Ligand Pro, Moscow, Russia), Daria Frolova (Ligand Pro, Moscow, Russia, Skolkovo Institute of Science and Technology, Artificial Intelligence Center, Moscow, Russia), Kseniia Fedisheva (Ligand Pro, Moscow, Russia), Sergei A. Nikolenko (Ligand Pro, Moscow, Russia), Alexander Shapeev (Ligand Pro, Moscow, Russia, Skolkovo Institute of Science and Technology, Artificial Intelligence Center, Moscow, Russia), Marina A. Pak (Ligand Pro, Moscow, Russia)