Integrating Protein Dynamics into Structure-Based Drug Design via Full-Atom Stochastic Flows

The dynamic nature of proteins, influenced by ligand interactions, is essential for comprehending protein function and progressing drug discovery. Traditional structure-based drug design (SBDD) approaches typically target binding sites with rigid structures, limiting their practical application in drug development. While molecular dynamics simulation can theoretically capture all the biologically relevant conformations, the transition rate is dictated by the intrinsic energy barrier between them, making the sampling process computationally expensive. To overcome the aforementioned challenges, we propose to use generative modeling for SBDD considering conformational changes of protein pockets. We curate a dataset of apo and multiple holo states of protein-ligand complexes, simulated by molecular dynamics, and propose a full-atom flow model (and a stochastic version), named DynamicFlow, that learns to transform apo pockets and noisy ligands into holo pockets and corresponding 3D ligand molecules. Our method uncovers promising ligand molecules and corresponding holo conformations of pockets. Additionally, the resultant holo-like states provide superior inputs for traditional SBDD approaches, playing a significant role in practical drug discovery.

An ensemble of VisNet, Transformer-M, and pretraining models for molecular property prediction in OGB Large-Scale Challenge @ NeurIPS 2022

In the technical report, we provide our solution for OGB-LSC 2022 Graph Regression Task. The target of this task is to predict the quantum chemical property, HOMO-LUMO gap for a given molecule on PCQM4Mv2 dataset. In the competition, we designed two kinds of models: Transformer-M-ViSNet which is an geometry-enhanced graph neural network for fully connected molecular graphs and Pretrained-3D-ViSNet which is a pretrained ViSNet by distilling geomeotric information from optimized structures. With an ensemble of 22 models, ViSNet Team achieved the MAE of 0.0723 eV on the test-challenge set, dramatically reducing the error by 39.75% compared with the best method in the last year competition.