One-Shot Rational Design of Covalent Drugs with CovalentLab

Abstract

Targeted covalent drugs have demonstrated remarkable potential in disease treatment over the past decades. However, existing methods for covalent drug design are often limited to serine and cysteine, ignoring other potentially ligandable binding sites. Statistical analyses indicate that over 95% of binding pockets contain covalent-binding residues, suggesting that all ligands that targeting these pockets possess the potential to be modified into covalent ligands. To achieve this goal, we introduced CovalentLab, an interactive computational platform that integrates ligand-based and warhead-based strategies into a unified workflow for the rational design of covalent ligands. Leveraging a covalent binding site prediction model constructed on ESM-2 with LoRA fine-tuning, CovalentLab enables the prediction and ranking of nine classes of covalent-binding residues in proteins according to their reactivity and facilitates systematic warhead attachment to ligands using 210 electrophilic groups or user-defined warheads. Using this platform, a comprehensive library of more than 100,000 covalent molecules across 95 targets was generated. Notably, CovalentLab has been successfully applied to various essential real-world targets, identifying wet-laboratory-validated bioactive compounds ranging from TRK orthosteric inhibitors to GAC allosteric inhibitors. By bridging gaps in covalent drug discovery, CovalentLab offers a versatile, publicly accessible resource to expand the druggable targets and accelerate the development of targeted covalent therapies.