让大模型用药学思维先探查再优化,提升药物分子设计效率
Probe Before You Edit: Probing-Guided Molecular Optimization for LLM Agents in Structure-Based Drug Design

- 先通过可控编辑探查分子响应,生成指导优化的反馈手册
- 在CrossDocked2020上实现当前最优性能,联合提升亲和力与成药性
- 适合需要平衡多目标优化的药物研发人员使用
基于结构的药物设计中,大模型代理通过迭代优化配体以提升靶点结合能力,但理想分子需同时满足高亲和力与良好成药性,单一优化步骤难以兼顾。本文提出两个诊断指标:单次修改同时提升两目标的频率,以及一增一减的负相关频率。对现有大模型流程的分析显示,其缺乏对局部修改后口袋-配体响应的认知,导致联合改进极少发生。受药化学家启发,我们提出PROBE框架:首先将配体分解为可编辑位点,构建针对特定口袋的“位点图”,标识出可能协同提升、存在权衡或需移除的结构区域;接着执行受控探针编辑并提炼响应为“编辑手册”;最终由亲和力、成药性及协同优化三个代理在位点图与手册指导下进行迭代优化。在CrossDocked2020基准测试中,PROBE达到当前最优表现,并显著缓解了诊断中揭示的失败模式。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Structure-based drug design increasingly employs LLM agents to iteratively refine ligands against a target pocket, yet a viable ligand must satisfy two often-conflicting objectives -- binding affinity and druggability -- which single optimization steps rarely improve together. To quantify this difficulty, we introduce two diagnostic metrics: the first measures how often a single edit improves both objectives, and the second measures how often a gain on one objective comes with a loss on the other. Applying these diagnostics to current LLM-agent pipelines exposes a consistent failure mode: the agent performs molecular editing without knowing how the pocket-ligand complex responds to local modifications, thus rarely achieving joint improvement. Inspired by medicinal chemists, who probe the pocket-ligand complex with controlled analog edits before choosing an optimization direction, we propose \textbf{PROBE}, an optimization framework built around edit-response probing. PROBE first decomposes the ligand into editable sites and builds a pocket-specific \textbf{site map} that flags where joint gains are plausible, where the two objectives are likely in tension, and where liability substructures should be changed; it then performs controlled probe edits whose responses are distilled into an \textbf{EditManual}. Guided by the site map and EditManual, PROBE runs an iterative multi-agent loop in which an affinity agent, a druggability agent, and a co-optimization agent jointly produce edits. On the CrossDocked2020 benchmark, PROBE achieves state-of-the-art performance and substantially mitigates the failure modes exposed by our diagnostics metrics.
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