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FlowDock: Geometric flow matching for generative protein–ligand docking and affinity prediction

Authors: Morehead, Alex; Cheng, Jianlin;

FlowDock: Geometric flow matching for generative protein–ligand docking and affinity prediction

Abstract

Abstract Motivation Powerful generative AI models of protein–ligand structure have recently been proposed, but few of these methods support both flexible protein–ligand docking and affinity estimation. Of those that do, none can directly model multiple binding ligands concurrently or have been rigorously benchmarked on pharmacologically relevant drug targets, hindering their widespread adoption in drug discovery efforts. Results In this work, we propose FlowDock, the first deep geometric generative model based on conditional flow matching (CFM) that learns to directly map unbound (apo) structures to their bound (holo) counterparts for an arbitrary number of binding ligands. Furthermore, FlowDock provides predicted structural confidence scores and binding affinity values with each of its generated protein–ligand complex structures, enabling fast virtual screening of new (multi-ligand) drug targets. For the well-known PoseBusters Benchmark dataset, FlowDock outperforms single-sequence AlphaFold 3 (AF3) with a 51% blind docking success rate using unbound (apo) protein input structures and without any information derived from multiple sequence alignments, and for the challenging new DockGen-E dataset, FlowDock outperforms single-sequence AF3 and matches single-sequence Chai-1 for binding pocket generalization. Additionally, in the ligand category of the 16th community-wide Critical Assessment of Techniques for Structure Prediction, FlowDock ranked among the top-5 methods for pharmacological binding affinity estimation across 140 protein–ligand complexes, demonstrating the efficacy of its learned representations in virtual screening. Availability and implementation Source code, data, and pre-trained models are available at https://github.com/BioinfoMachineLearning/FlowDock

Keywords

FOS: Computer and information sciences, Computer Science - Machine Learning, J.3, Computer Science - Artificial Intelligence, Ligands, Quantitative Biology - Quantitative Methods, Machine Learning (cs.LG), Drug Discovery, Protein-ligand structure, I.2.1; J.3, Quantitative Methods (q-bio.QM), Binding Sites, Proteins, Biomolecules (q-bio.BM), I.2.1, Molecular Docking Simulation, Binding affinity, Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI), Quantitative Biology - Biomolecules, General Computational Biology, FOS: Biological sciences, Generative modeling, Flow matching, Software, Algorithms, Protein Binding

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    Top 10%
    influence
    This indicator reflects the overall/total impact of an article in the research community at large, based on the underlying citation network (diachronically).
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    impulse
    This indicator reflects the initial momentum of an article directly after its publication, based on the underlying citation network.
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selected citations
These citations are derived from selected sources.
This is an alternative to the "Influence" indicator, which also reflects the overall/total impact of an article in the research community at large, based on the underlying citation network (diachronically).
BIP!Citations provided by BIP!
popularity
This indicator reflects the "current" impact/attention (the "hype") of an article in the research community at large, based on the underlying citation network.
BIP!Popularity provided by BIP!
influence
This indicator reflects the overall/total impact of an article in the research community at large, based on the underlying citation network (diachronically).
BIP!Influence provided by BIP!
impulse
This indicator reflects the initial momentum of an article directly after its publication, based on the underlying citation network.
BIP!Impulse provided by BIP!
15
Top 10%
Average
Top 10%
Green
gold