English

FLOWR: Flow Matching for Structure-Aware De Novo, Interaction- and Fragment-Based Ligand Generation

Quantitative Methods 2025-05-14 v2 Machine Learning Biomolecules

Abstract

We introduce FLOWR, a novel structure-based framework for the generation and optimization of three-dimensional ligands. FLOWR integrates continuous and categorical flow matching with equivariant optimal transport, enhanced by an efficient protein pocket conditioning. Alongside FLOWR, we present SPINDR, a thoroughly curated dataset comprising ligand-pocket co-crystal complexes specifically designed to address existing data quality issues. Empirical evaluations demonstrate that FLOWR surpasses current state-of-the-art diffusion- and flow-based methods in terms of PoseBusters-validity, pose accuracy, and interaction recovery, while offering a significant inference speedup, achieving up to 70-fold faster performance. In addition, we introduce FLOWR:multi, a highly accurate multi-purpose model allowing for the targeted sampling of novel ligands that adhere to predefined interaction profiles and chemical substructures for fragment-based design without the need of re-training or any re-sampling strategies

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2504.10564,
  title  = {FLOWR: Flow Matching for Structure-Aware De Novo, Interaction- and Fragment-Based Ligand Generation},
  author = {Julian Cremer and Ross Irwin and Alessandro Tibo and Jon Paul Janet and Simon Olsson and Djork-Arné Clevert},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2504.10564},
  year   = {2025}
}