Structure-based drug design (SBDD), which aims to generate 3D ligand molecules binding to target proteins, is a fundamental task in drug discovery. Existing SBDD methods typically treat protein as rigid and neglect protein structural change when binding with ligand molecules, leading to a big gap with real-world scenarios and inferior generation qualities (e.g., many steric clashes). To bridge the gap, we propose FlexSBDD, a deep generative model capable of accurately modeling the flexible protein-ligand complex structure for ligand molecule generation. FlexSBDD adopts an efficient flow matching framework and leverages E(3)-equivariant network with scalar-vector dual representation to model dynamic structural changes. Moreover, novel data augmentation schemes based on structure relaxation/sidechain repacking are adopted to boost performance. Extensive experiments demonstrate that FlexSBDD achieves state-of-the-art performance in generating high-affinity molecules and effectively modeling the protein's conformation change to increase favorable protein-ligand interactions (e.g., Hydrogen bonds) and decrease steric clashes.

The design and optimization of functional proteins that bind specific ligand molecules is paramount in therapeutics and bio-engineering.

Our algorithm can well transfer the knowledge gained in single-target pretraining to dual-target scenarios in a zero-shot manner.

To overcome the limitations of autoregressive methods (e.g., error accumulation), recent works

The design and optimization of functional proteins that bind specific ligand molecules is paramount in therapeutics and bio-engineering.

Structure-based drug design (SBDD), which aims to generate 3D ligand molecules binding to target proteins, is a fundamental task in drug discovery. Existing SBDD methods typically treat protein as rigid and neglect protein structural change when binding with ligand molecules, leading to a big gap with real-world scenarios and inferior generation qualities (e.g., many steric clashes). To bridge the gap, we propose FlexSBDD, a deep generative model capable of accurately modeling the flexible protein-ligand complex structure for ligand molecule generation. FlexSBDD adopts an efficient flow matching framework and leverages E(3)-equivariant network with scalar-vector dual representation to model dynamic structural changes. Moreover, novel data augmentation schemes based on structure relaxation/sidechain repacking are adopted to boost performance.

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. Additionally, the resultant holo-like states provide superior inputs for traditional SBDD approaches, playing a significant role in practical drug discovery. Modern deep learning is advancing several areas within drug discovery. Notably, among these, structure-based drug design (SBDD) (Anderson, 2003) emerges as a particularly significant and challenging domain. SBDD aims to discover drug-like ligand molecules specifically tailored to target binding sites. However, the complexity of chemical space and the dynamic nature of molecule conformations make traditional methods such as high throughput and virtual screenings inefficient. Additionally, relying on compound databases limits the diversity of identified molecules. Thus, deep generative models, such as autoregressive models (Luo et al., 2021; Peng et al., 2022) and diffusion models (Guan et al., 2023; Schneuing et al., 2022), have been introduced as a tool for de novo 3D ligand molecule design based on binding pockets, significantly transforming research paradigms. However, most SBDD methods based on deep generative models assume that proteins are rigid (Peng et al., 2022; Guan et al., 2024). However, the dynamic behavior of proteins is crucial for practical drug discovery (Karelina et al., 2023; Boehr et al., 2009). Thermodynamic fluctuations result in proteins existing as an ensemble of various conformational states, and such states may interact with different drug molecules. During binding, the protein's structure may undergo fine-tuning, adopting different conformations to optimize its interaction with the drug, a phenomenon referred to as induced fit (Sherman et al., 2006).

Deep generative models have achieved tremendous success in structure-based drug design in recent years, especially for generating 3D ligand molecules that bind to specific protein pocket. Notably, diffusion models have transformed ligand generation by providing exceptional quality and creativity. However, traditional diffusion models are restricted by their conventional learning objectives, which limit their broader applicability. In this work, we propose a new framework FlowSBDD, which is based on rectified flow model, allows us to flexibly incorporate additional loss to optimize specific target and introduce additional condition either as an extra input condition or replacing the initial Gaussian distribution. Extensive experiments on CrossDocked2020 show that our approach could achieve state-of-the-art performance on generating high-affinity molecules while maintaining proper molecular properties without specifically designing binding site, with up to -8.50 Avg. Vina Dock score and 75.0% Diversity.