FusedBFN formulates dual-target generation as distribution fusion in a unified continuous parameter space and employs a product-of-experts formulation to incorporate dual-target information throughout the generative process to address the scarcity of dual-target structural data.
Abstract
Dual-target drug design aims to generate 3D molecules that can simultaneously interact with two target proteins, offering a promising route for discovering polypharmacological compounds against complex diseases. While recent generative models have shown encouraging performance in single-target drug design, existing dual-target approaches either focus on sequence generation or introduce an additional predictive drift term into the diffusion-based generative trajectory, which limits their ability to fully integrate feature information from both targets. We propose FusedBFN, a fused Bayesian flow network (BFN) for dual-target molecular design. FusedBFN formulates dual-target generation as distribution fusion in a unified continuous parameter space and employs a product-of-experts formulation to incorporate dual-target information throughout the generative process. To address the scarcity of dual-target structural data, we leverage a pretrained target-aware BFN model as the shared backbone. We further introduce a chemically aware prior-based alignment method and a prior-free pocket alignment strategy to construct aligned dual-target contexts. Extensive experiments demonstrate that FusedBFN generates molecules with strong binding affinity toward dual targets while maintaining favorable molecular properties.
This review elucidates the paradigm shift in drug discovery from serendipitous exploration to rational, structure-driven polypharmacological molecular engineering, thereby providing a clear, structured guide for navigating the complexities of next-generation therapeutics.
Tianming Han, Zhijie Pan, Wenchi Ge et al.· 0 citations
A novel method named Perturbed Flow Matching (PFM), which significantly reduces sampling steps by leveraging a Flow Matching framework and introduces a unique perturbed conditional probability path design that incorporates pocket binding site information and atom type-coordinate coupled information to enhance molecular generation performance.
This survey provides a comprehensive review of over 100 methods in 3D structure-based drug design (SBDD) and molecular optimisation, and proposes a unified taxonomy covering four primary generative paradigms: autoregressive models, diffusion models, flow matching, and Bayesian Flow Networks.
Accurately predicting binding affinities between drugs and targets is crucial for drug discovery but remains challenging due to the complexity of modeling interactions between small drug and large targets. This research presents Dual modality feature fused-drug target affinity (DMFF-DTA), a model for drug-target affinity anticipation using dual-modality neural networks that considers both the sequence and graph structure of medicines and proteins. To facilitate more exact and efficient drug-target interaction modeling, the model incorporates a binding site-focused graph generation method for extracting binding information. Experimental results show that DMFF-DTA is far more effective than current state-of-the-art approaches. By outperforming state-of-the-art approaches by more than 8%, the model demonstrates remarkable generalizability to hitherto unexplored medicines and targets. The model's biological relevance is confirmed by the model interpretability analysis. This paper presents a reliable and understandable method for improving computational drug discovery by integrating multi-view protein and drug properties.
Ghazala Sultan, J. Vincent, Ratna Sahaya et al.· International Conference Com...· 0 citations
Drug discovery and development is time-consuming and resource-intensive, motivating computational approaches such as diffusion models for de novo drug design. Many such models follow the structure-based drug design (SBDD) paradigm, generating molecules to fit a target binding pocket. However, existing diffusion-based SBDD methods typically couple pocket and ligand representation learning, model interactions only at the atom level, and prioritize binding affinity over other developability properties. Here, we introduce conDitar-dev, a conditional diffusion-based SBDD framework for generating ligands with strong binding affinities and favorable ADMET properties. It consists of three modules: msPRL, a pretrained multi-scale pocket representation learning module; conDitar, a pocket-conditioned diffusion model guided by msPRL representations; and paOPT, a generation-time method for optimizing ligand developability. On a newly curated benchmark of human disease targets, conDitar outperforms state-of-the-art SBDD baselines, achieving an average binding score of -8.85 kcal/mol. Across five ADMET properties, conDitar-dev improves performance by up to 73% over conDitar. To further validate the abilities of conDitar-dev to generate developable molecules, we have applied it to two validated druggable targets: programmed death-ligand 1 (PD-L1) and colony-stimulating factor 1 receptor (CSF1R) proteins. Top-ranked generatively designed molecules and their analogs have been experimentally synthesized and biologically tested. Two molecules generated directly by conDitar-dev for PD-L1 exhibited SPR-derived $K_D$ values of 3.49 and 3.75 $\mu$M, respectively. Hit expansion based on conDitar-dev-designed molecules identified selective CSF1R inhibitors with IC$_{50}$ values as low as 200 nM, while also uncovering opportunities for drug repositioning.
Ruoxi Gao, Jiangweizhi Peng, Ziqi Chen et al.· 0 citations
Accurate prediction of drug-target binding affinity (DTA) is a key task in virtual screening. However, current computational methods face a key challenge: sequence-based approaches often fail to capture critical spatial information, while structure-based models rely on computationally expensive 3D coordinates, which restrict their scalability. To address this issue, we propose StructuraDTA, a novel multimodal framework that adopts an implicit structure modeling strategy. Instead of using static protein folding data, our method encodes drug molecular graphs via Graph Isomorphism Networks (GINs) to capture fine-grained topological features. Meanwhile, we optimize protein representations by integrating probabilistic structural priors into a pretrained language model, which effectively simulates thermodynamic conformational flexibility without relying on explicit 3D structural data. A bidirectional cross-attention mechanism is then used to dynamically align these heterogeneous feature modalities. Comprehensive evaluations on the Davis and KIBA benchmark datasets show that StructuraDTA stably outperforms state of-the-art comparison methods. Importantly, the model exhibits strong robustness in cold-start scenarios, and can accurately predict binding affinities for previously unseen drugs and targets. By retaining the predictive performance of structure based models while maintaining the high inference efficiency of sequence-based methods, we provide an accurate and scalable solution to accelerate genome-scale drug discovery research.
Junlin Xu, Ye Yuan, Menglong Hu et al.· IEEE journal of biomedical a...· 0 citations