Papers
arXiv:2508.02137

Fitness aligned structural modeling enables scalable virtual screening with AuroBind

Published on Aug 4
· Submitted by Siqi Sun on Aug 5
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Abstract

AuroBind is a scalable virtual screening framework that fine-tunes atomic-level structural models to predict ligand-bound structures and binding fitness, achieving high hit rates in prospective screens across disease-relevant targets.

AI-generated summary

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.

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Paper submitter

We introduced AuroBind, which 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. Aurobind achieved experimental hit rates of 7-69%, with top compounds reaching sub-nanomolar to picomolar potency.
A lightweight version of the code and pretrained weights is available at https://github.com/GENTEL-lab/AuroBind

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