Papers for

biotechnology engineers

Papers whose findings have a practical use for this group, as judged from the abstract. Open a paper to read what it means in practice.

Attentive geometric learning improves antibody design accuracy and affinity

AbGaze: Attentive Geometric Representation Learning for End-to-End Antibody Design

Abstract: Computational antibody design requires representations that capture the geometric patterns underlying antigen--antibody interactions, yet existing approaches often rely on scalar distances or surface-intrinsic features, leaving cross-molecular geometry largely implicit. We present AbGaze, an end-to-end antibody design framework based on attentive geometric representation learning, which encodes distance, spatial direction, and surface-normal orientation of antigen surfaces relative to antibody-residue local frames, and adaptively aggregates these geometric interactions according to their interfacial context. The learned interaction representation is shared across multi-CDR co-design, complex structure prediction, and affinity optimization, with local-frame geometric supervision further constraining the representation. AbGaze outperforms prior methods across all three tasks: relative to the second-best method, it improves amino-acid recovery by 7.1% and reduces structural error by 14.9% on average over the six CDRs, improves interface docking quality (DockQ) by 6.6%, and raises the affinity improvement rate (IMP) by 32.5%.

Mon 28 SeptArtificial Intelligence
The gist
Designing antibodies that fit well with antigens is important for medicine, but it requires understanding complex 3D shapes and interactions. The authors created AbGaze, a method that looks closely at distances, directions, and surface shapes to better capture these details. This helps design antibodies more accurately, predict their structures, and improve how strongly they bind. AbGaze works better than earlier methods in several tests involving antibody parts, docking, and strength of binding.
Open → 2609.35296v1

CAGenMol-2 enables versatile drug molecule design from one model

One Sequence, Many Decodings: CAGenMol-2 Recasts Drug Design as Masked Molecular Inference

Abstract: Drug design couples property evaluation, conditional generation, structure-based design, and local optimization, yet machine learning systems typically address these capabilities with separate task-specific models. We introduce CAGenMol-2, a masked diffusion molecular language model that represents molecules, continuous scalar properties, and 3D protein pockets within a single wrapped sequence. Within this pretrained interface, downstream operations are selected by which sequence regions are observed or masked at inference, allowing one checkpoint to perform property prediction, property- and pocket-conditioned generation, and partial-constraint design without task-specific architectures or backbone fine-tuning. We further propose Adaptive Fragment Optimization (AdaFO), a gradient-free mask-and-refill search that turns the masked decoder into an iterative local molecular optimizer. On CrossDocked2020, AdaFO increases Success Rate from 30.2\% to 70.8\%, the best reported under this protocol, while largely preserving drug-likeness and diversity. Finally, scaffold-preserving directional editing and CRBN/VHL case studies demonstrate its use in compound design workflows spanning local molecular editing, structure-based prioritization, and downstream simulation-based screening.

Mon 28 SeptMachine LearningArtificial Intelligence
The gist
Designing new drug molecules usually requires many different specialized tools. The authors present CAGenMol-2, a single AI model that can understand molecules, predict properties, design new molecules, and optimize parts of them all at once. By selectively revealing or hiding different pieces of information during use, this one model can perform many tasks without needing separate setups. They also introduce AdaFO, a new method that improves molecule design success without needing gradients, leading to better drug candidates. This approach works well with preserving important molecule structures and helps guide drug discovery workflows.
Open → 2609.34301v1