2025/03/21 by Tai Dang, Long-Hung Dinh Pham, Dang, Tai +14
Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology · Computer Science · Materials Science · #Biomolecules (q-bio.BM) #Computational Drug Discovery Methods #FOS: Biological sciences #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Human-Computer Interaction (cs.HC) #Machine Learning (cs.LG) #Machine Learning in Bioinformatics #Machine Learning in Materials Science
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2503.16841
openalex publication_date 2025/03/21 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Despite decades of advancements in automated ligand screening, large-scale drug discovery remains resource-intensive and requires post-processing hit selection, a step where chemists manually select a few promising molecules based on their chemical intuition. This creates a major bottleneck in the virtual screening process for drug discovery, demanding experts to repeatedly balance complex trade-offs among drug properties across a vast pool of candidates. To improve the efficiency and reliability of this process, we propose a novel human-centered framework named CheapVS that allows chemists to guide the ligand selection process by providing preferences regarding the trade-offs between drug properties via pairwise comparison. Our framework combines preferential multi-objective Bayesian optimization with a docking model for measuring binding affinity to capture human chemical intuition for improving hit identification. Specifically, on a library of 100K chemical candidates targeting EGFR and DRD2, CheapVS outperforms state-of-the-art screening methods in identifying drugs within a limited computational budget. Notably, our method can recover up to 16/37 EGFR and 37/58 DRD2 known drugs while screening only 6% of the library, showcasing its potential to significantly advance drug discovery.