QMApr 14, 2025
FLOWR: Flow Matching for Structure-Aware De Novo, Interaction- and Fragment-Based Ligand GenerationJulian Cremer, Ross Irwin, Alessandro Tibo et al.
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
LGApr 10, 2025
Compositional Flows for 3D Molecule and Synthesis Pathway Co-designTony Shen, Seonghwan Seo, Ross Irwin et al.
Many generative applications, such as synthesis-based 3D molecular design, involve constructing compositional objects with continuous features. Here, we introduce Compositional Generative Flows (CGFlow), a novel framework that extends flow matching to generate objects in compositional steps while modeling continuous states. Our key insight is that modeling compositional state transitions can be formulated as a straightforward extension of the flow matching interpolation process. We further build upon the theoretical foundations of generative flow networks (GFlowNets), enabling reward-guided sampling of compositional structures. We apply CGFlow to synthesizable drug design by jointly designing the molecule's synthetic pathway with its 3D binding pose. Our approach achieves state-of-the-art binding affinity on all 15 targets from the LIT-PCBA benchmark, and 5.8$\times$ improvement in sampling efficiency compared to 2D synthesis-based baseline. To our best knowledge, our method is also the first to achieve state of-art-performance in both Vina Dock (-9.38) and AiZynth success rate (62.2\%) on the CrossDocked benchmark.
LGJun 11, 2024
SemlaFlow -- Efficient 3D Molecular Generation with Latent Attention and Equivariant Flow MatchingRoss Irwin, Alessandro Tibo, Jon Paul Janet et al.
Methods for jointly generating molecular graphs along with their 3D conformations have gained prominence recently due to their potential impact on structure-based drug design. Current approaches, however, often suffer from very slow sampling times or generate molecules with poor chemical validity. Addressing these limitations, we propose Semla, a scalable E(3)-equivariant message passing architecture. We further introduce an unconditional 3D molecular generation model, SemlaFlow, which is trained using equivariant flow matching to generate a joint distribution over atom types, coordinates, bond types and formal charges. Our model produces state-of-the-art results on benchmark datasets with as few as 20 sampling steps, corresponding to a two order-of-magnitude speedup compared to state-of-the-art. Furthermore, we highlight limitations of current evaluation methods for 3D generation and propose new benchmark metrics for unconditional molecular generators. Finally, using these new metrics, we compare our model's ability to generate high quality samples against current approaches and further demonstrate SemlaFlow's strong performance.