right location
Pearl: A Foundation Model for Placing Every Atom in the Right Location
Genesis Research Team, null, Dobles, Alejandro, Jovic, Nina, Leidal, Kenneth, Murugan, Pranav, Williams, David C., Wulsin, Drausin, Gruver, Nate, Ji, Christina X., Pruegsanusak, Korrawat, Scarpellini, Gianluca, Sharma, Ansh, Swiderski, Wojciech, Bootsma, Andrea, Bowen, Richard Strong, Chen, Charlotte, Chen, Jamin, Dämgen, Marc André, DiFrancesco, Benjamin, Fishman, J. D., Ivanova, Alla, Kagin, Zach, Li-Bland, David, Liu, Zuli, Morozov, Igor, Ouyang-Zhang, Jeffrey, Pickard, Frank C. IV, Shah, Kushal S., Shor, Ben, da Silva, Gabriel Monteiro, Tal, Roy, Tessmer, Maxx, Tilbury, Carl, Vetcher, Cyr, Zeng, Daniel, Al-Shedivat, Maruan, Faust, Aleksandra, Feinberg, Evan N., LeVine, Michael V., Pan, Matteus
Accurately predicting the three-dimensional structures of protein-ligand complexes remains a fundamental challenge in computational drug discovery that limits the pace and success of therapeutic design. Deep learning methods have recently shown strong potential as structural prediction tools, achieving promising accuracy across diverse biomolecular systems. However, their performance and utility are constrained by scarce experimental data, inefficient architectures, physically invalid poses, and the limited ability to exploit auxiliary information available at inference. To address these issues, we introduce Pearl (Placing Every Atom in the Right Location), a foundation model for protein-ligand cofolding at scale. Pearl addresses these challenges with three key innovations: (1) training recipes that include large-scale synthetic data to overcome data scarcity; (2) architectures that incorporate an SO(3)-equivariant diffusion module to inherently respect 3D rotational symmetries, improving generalization and sample efficiency, and (3) controllable inference, including a generalized multi-chain templating system supporting both protein and non-polymeric components as well as dual unconditional/conditional modes. Pearl establishes a new state-of-the-art performance in protein-ligand cofolding. On the key metric of generating accurate (RMSD < 2 Å) and physically valid poses, Pearl surpasses AlphaFold 3 and other open source baselines on the public Runs N' Poses and PoseBusters benchmarks, delivering 14.5% and 14.2% improvements, respectively, over the next best model. In the pocket-conditional cofolding regime, Pearl delivers $3.6\times$ improvement on a proprietary set of challenging, real-world drug targets at the more rigorous RMSD < 1 Å threshold. Finally, we demonstrate that model performance correlates directly with synthetic dataset size used in training.
Is AI the key to finding the right location, location, location? – RetailWire
The conventional wisdom is that being in the right location is critical to success in retail. As one Japanese convenience store pursues an expansion, it may be getting some non-human help to decide where its stores should go. Convenience store chain Lawson is considering using artificial intelligence (AI) to determine where to place its new store locations, according to the Japan Times. The chain plans to use AI to collect marketing data, such as household distribution patterns and traffic volume, to determine a given store's chances of success in an area. Generally, the chain makes such decisions based on information gathering and analysis of an area carried out by staff.