AI-guided Antibiotic Discovery Pipeline from Target Selection to Compound Identification

Fuente: arXiv
Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Schuh, Maximilian G., Hesse, Joshua, Sieber, Stephan A.
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
Subjects:
Online Access:
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866909618573148160
author Schuh, Maximilian G.
Hesse, Joshua
Sieber, Stephan A.
author_facet Schuh, Maximilian G.
Hesse, Joshua
Sieber, Stephan A.
contents Antibiotic resistance presents a growing global health crisis, demanding new therapeutic strategies that target novel bacterial mechanisms. Recent advances in protein structure prediction and machine learning-driven molecule generation offer a promising opportunity to accelerate drug discovery. However, practical guidance on selecting and integrating these models into real-world pipelines remains limited. In this study, we develop an end-to-end, artificial intelligence-guided antibiotic discovery pipeline that spans target identification to compound realization. We leverage structure-based clustering across predicted proteomes of multiple pathogens to identify conserved, essential, and non-human-homologous targets. We then systematically evaluate six leading 3D-structure-aware generative models$\unicode{x2014}$spanning diffusion, autoregressive, graph neural network, and language model architectures$\unicode{x2014}$on their usability, chemical validity, and biological relevance. Rigorous post-processing filters and commercial analogue searches reduce over 100 000 generated compounds to a focused, synthesizable set. Our results highlight DeepBlock and TamGen as top performers across diverse criteria, while also revealing critical trade-offs between model complexity, usability, and output quality. This work provides a comparative benchmark and blueprint for deploying artificial intelligence in early-stage antibiotic development.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2504_11091
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle AI-guided Antibiotic Discovery Pipeline from Target Selection to Compound Identification
Schuh, Maximilian G.
Hesse, Joshua
Sieber, Stephan A.
Biomolecules
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
Antibiotic resistance presents a growing global health crisis, demanding new therapeutic strategies that target novel bacterial mechanisms. Recent advances in protein structure prediction and machine learning-driven molecule generation offer a promising opportunity to accelerate drug discovery. However, practical guidance on selecting and integrating these models into real-world pipelines remains limited. In this study, we develop an end-to-end, artificial intelligence-guided antibiotic discovery pipeline that spans target identification to compound realization. We leverage structure-based clustering across predicted proteomes of multiple pathogens to identify conserved, essential, and non-human-homologous targets. We then systematically evaluate six leading 3D-structure-aware generative models$\unicode{x2014}$spanning diffusion, autoregressive, graph neural network, and language model architectures$\unicode{x2014}$on their usability, chemical validity, and biological relevance. Rigorous post-processing filters and commercial analogue searches reduce over 100 000 generated compounds to a focused, synthesizable set. Our results highlight DeepBlock and TamGen as top performers across diverse criteria, while also revealing critical trade-offs between model complexity, usability, and output quality. This work provides a comparative benchmark and blueprint for deploying artificial intelligence in early-stage antibiotic development.
title AI-guided Antibiotic Discovery Pipeline from Target Selection to Compound Identification
topic Biomolecules
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.11091