Paper ID: 2405.01616

Generative Active Learning for the Search of Small-molecule Protein Binders

Maksym Korablyov, Cheng-Hao Liu, Moksh Jain, Almer M. van der Sloot, Eric Jolicoeur, Edward Ruediger, Andrei Cristian Nica, Emmanuel Bengio, Kostiantyn Lapchevskyi, Daniel St-Cyr, Doris Alexandra Schuetz, Victor Ion Butoi, Jarrid Rector-Brooks, Simon Blackburn, Leo Feng, Hadi Nekoei, SaiKrishna Gottipati, Priyesh Vijayan, Prateek Gupta, Ladislav Rampášek, Sasikanth Avancha, Pierre-Luc Bacon, William L. Hamilton, Brooks Paige, Sanchit Misra, Stanislaw Kamil Jastrzebski, Bharat Kaul, Doina Precup, José Miguel Hernández-Lobato, Marwin Segler, Michael Bronstein, Anne Marinier, Mike Tyers, Yoshua Bengio

Despite substantial progress in machine learning for scientific discovery in recent years, truly de novo design of small molecules which exhibit a property of interest remains a significant challenge. We introduce LambdaZero, a generative active learning approach to search for synthesizable molecules. Powered by deep reinforcement learning, LambdaZero learns to search over the vast space of molecules to discover candidates with a desired property. We apply LambdaZero with molecular docking to design novel small molecules that inhibit the enzyme soluble Epoxide Hydrolase 2 (sEH), while enforcing constraints on synthesizability and drug-likeliness. LambdaZero provides an exponential speedup in terms of the number of calls to the expensive molecular docking oracle, and LambdaZero de novo designed molecules reach docking scores that would otherwise require the virtual screening of a hundred billion molecules. Importantly, LambdaZero discovers novel scaffolds of synthesizable, drug-like inhibitors for sEH. In in vitro experimental validation, a series of ligands from a generated quinazoline-based scaffold were synthesized, and the lead inhibitor N-(4,6-di(pyrrolidin-1-yl)quinazolin-2-yl)-N-methylbenzamide (UM0152893) displayed sub-micromolar enzyme inhibition of sEH.

Submitted: May 2, 2024