Leveraging binding-site structure for drug discovery with point-cloud methods

Abstract: Computational drug discovery strategies can be broadly placed in two categories: ligand-based methods which identify novel molecules by similarity with known ligands, and structure-based methods which predict molecules with high-affinity to a given 3D structure (e.g. a protein). However, ligand-based methods do not leverage information about the binding site, and structure-based approaches rely on the knowledge of a finite set of ligands binding the target. In this work, we introduce TarLig, a novel approach that aims to bridge the gap between ligand and structure-based approaches. We use the 3D structure of the binding site as input to a model which predicts the ligand preferences of the binding site. The resulting predictions could then offer promising seeds and constraints in the chemical space search, based on the binding site structure. TarLig outperforms standard models by introducing a data-alignment and augmentation technique. The recent popularity of Volumetric 3DCNN pipelines in structural bioinformatics suggests that this extra step could help a wide range of methods to improve their results with minimal modifications.