English

Fitness aligned structural modeling enables scalable virtual screening with AuroBind

Machine Learning 2025-08-05 v1 Artificial Intelligence

Abstract

Most human proteins remain undrugged, over 96% of human proteins remain unexploited by approved therapeutics. While structure-based virtual screening promises to expand the druggable proteome, existing methods lack atomic-level precision and fail to predict binding fitness, limiting translational impact. We present AuroBind, a scalable virtual screening framework that fine-tunes a custom atomic-level structural model on million-scale chemogenomic data. AuroBind integrates direct preference optimization, self-distillation from high-confidence complexes, and a teacher-student acceleration strategy to jointly predict ligand-bound structures and binding fitness. The proposed models outperform state-of-the-art models on structural and functional benchmarks while enabling 100,000-fold faster screening across ultra-large compound libraries. In a prospective screen across ten disease-relevant targets, AuroBind achieved experimental hit rates of 7-69%, with top compounds reaching sub-nanomolar to picomolar potency. For the orphan GPCRs GPR151 and GPR160, AuroBind identified both agonists and antagonists with success rates of 16-30%, and functional assays confirmed GPR160 modulation in liver and prostate cancer models. AuroBind offers a generalizable framework for structure-function learning and high-throughput molecular screening, bridging the gap between structure prediction and therapeutic discovery.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2508.02137,
  title  = {Fitness aligned structural modeling enables scalable virtual screening with AuroBind},
  author = {Zhongyue Zhang and Jiahua Rao and Jie Zhong and Weiqiang Bai and Dongxue Wang and Shaobo Ning and Lifeng Qiao and Sheng Xu and Runze Ma and Will Hua and Jack Xiaoyu Chen and Odin Zhang and Wei Lu and Hanyi Feng and He Yang and Xinchao Shi and Rui Li and Wanli Ouyang and Xinzhu Ma and Jiahao Wang and Jixian Zhang and Jia Duan and Siqi Sun and Jian Zhang and Shuangjia Zheng},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2508.02137},
  year   = {2025}
}

Comments

54 pages, 13 figures, code available at https://github.com/GENTEL-lab/AuroBind

R2 v1 2026-07-01T04:32:46.307Z