Unified all-atom molecule generation with neural fields

Matthieu Kirchmeyer (Genentech) · Pedro O. Pinheiro (Prescient Design / Genentech) · Emma Willett (Genentech) · Karolis Martinkus (Prescient Design, Genentech, Roche) · Joseph Kleinhenz (Prescient Design, Genentech) · Emily Makowski (Genentech) · Andrew Watkins (Prescient Design, Genentech/Roche) · Vladimir Gligorijevic (Genentech) · Richard Bonneau (Genentech) · Saeed Saremi (Genentech)
antibody complementarity-determining regionsco-crystal structurescontinuous atomic densitiesde novo redesigndiverse atomic systemsgenerative modelsin silico performancemacrocyclic peptidesmodality-agnostic representationneural fieldsnon-canonical amino acidsscore-based generative modelsstructure-based drug designstructure-conditioned macrocyclic peptide generationtarget-conditioned moleculesvariable atom counts

Generative models for structure-based drug design are often limited to a specific modality, restricting their broader applicability. To address this challenge, we introduce FuncBind, a framework based on computer vision to generate target-conditioned, all-atom molecules across atomic systems. FuncBind uses neural fields to represent molecules as continuous atomic densities and employs score-based generative models with modern architectures adapted from the computer vision literature. This modality-agnostic representation allows a single unified model to be trained on diverse atomic systems, from small to large molecules, and handle variable atom/residue counts, including non-canonical amino acids. FuncBind achieves competitive in silico performance in generating small molecules, macrocyclic peptides, and antibody complementarity-determining region loops, conditioned on target structures. FuncBind also generated in vitro novel antibody binders via de novo redesign of the complementarity-determining region H3 loop of two chosen co-crystal structures. As a final contribution, we introduce a new dataset and benchmark for structure-conditioned macrocyclic peptide generation.