新方法让药物筛选在结构不确定时仍准确,尤其适合无结合口袋信息的早期研发。
AANet: Virtual Screening under Structural Uncertainty via Alignment and Aggregation
- 用三模态对比学习对齐配体、完整口袋和预测空腔,提升对口袋位置误差的鲁棒性。
- 在未标注口袋的无偏测试中,关键指标EF1%从11.75提升至37.19,显著优于现有方法。
- 适用于阿尔法折叠预测结构或无实验结构的早期药物发现场景,有开源实现。
虚拟筛选是现代药物发现的关键环节,但现有方法多基于已知配体结合口袋的完整蛋白结构设计,导致在无配体(apo)或如AlphaFold2预测的结构上性能大幅下降,而这类结构更贴近真实早期研发场景。本文提出一种对齐与聚合框架(AANet),以应对结构不确定性。核心包括:(1) 三模态对比学习模块,对齐配体、完整口袋与结构中检测到的空腔表示,增强对口袋定位误差的鲁棒性;(2) 基于交叉注意力的适配器,动态聚合候选结合位点,使模型能从活性数据中学习,即使缺乏精确口袋标注。我们在新构建的apo结构基准上评估,结果表明在盲筛设置下,早期富集因子(EF1%)从11.75大幅提升至37.19,显著超越当前最优方法。该模型在完整结构上也保持优异表现。本工作为首个有效处理结构不确定性下的虚拟筛选方法,推动首创新药研发进程。代码已公开于https://github.com/Wiley-Z/AANet。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Virtual screening (VS) is a critical component of modern drug discovery, yet most existing methods--whether physics-based or deep learning-based--are developed around holo protein structures with known ligand-bound pockets. Consequently, their performance degrades significantly on apo or predicted structures such as those from AlphaFold2, which are more representative of real-world early-stage drug discovery, where pocket information is often missing. In this paper, we introduce an alignment-and-aggregation framework to enable accurate virtual screening under structural uncertainty. Our method comprises two core components: (1) a tri-modal contrastive learning module that aligns representations of the ligand, the holo pocket, and cavities detected from structures, thereby enhancing robustness to pocket localization error; and (2) a cross-attention based adapter for dynamically aggregating candidate binding sites, enabling the model to learn from activity data even without precise pocket annotations. We evaluated our method on a newly curated benchmark of apo structures, where it significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods in blind apo setting, improving the early enrichment factor (EF1%) from 11.75 to 37.19. Notably, it also maintains strong performance on holo structures. These results demonstrate the promise of our approach in advancing first-in-class drug discovery, particularly in scenarios lacking experimentally resolved protein-ligand complexes. Our implementation is publicly available at https://github.com/Wiley-Z/AANet.
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