KinetiDiff: Docking-Guided Diffusion for De Novo ACVR1 Inhibitor Design in Fibrodysplasia Ossificans Progressiva

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Main Author: Patel, Aaryan
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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author Patel, Aaryan
author_facet Patel, Aaryan
contents We present KinetiDiff, a structure-based framework for de novo kinase inhibitor design that integrates a Geometry-Complete Diffusion Model with real-time AutoDock Vina gradient guidance. By injecting physics-based docking gradients into the diffusion denoising loop, KinetiDiff steers molecule generation toward high-affinity conformations for ACVR1 (ALK2), the causative kinase in Fibrodysplasia Ossificans Progressiva. From 10,000 diffusion samples, the framework produced 9,997 valid molecules. The best candidate achieved $-11.05$ kcal/mol (pKd = 8.10), a 19.2% improvement over the crystallographic reference. The top 100 candidates all exceed the reference, with 100% Lipinski compliance, median synthetic accessibility of 2.67, and internal diversity of 0.790. Systematic ablation across four guidance strategies--Vina-Direct (physics), HNN-Denovo (neural proxy), multi-objective, and unguided--demonstrates that real-time docking guidance dominates on all metrics. We evaluate HNN-Denovo as a computationally efficient alternative (60-fold speedup per step), revealing a domain-mismatch limitation (r = 0.224 correlation with Vina) that explains its inferior performance. These results establish gradient-guided geometric diffusion as a practical approach for generating potent, synthetically accessible inhibitors against rare-disease kinase targets.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2604_20886
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle KinetiDiff: Docking-Guided Diffusion for De Novo ACVR1 Inhibitor Design in Fibrodysplasia Ossificans Progressiva
Patel, Aaryan
Chemical Physics
Machine Learning
I.2.6; I.5.1; I.5.4; J.3
We present KinetiDiff, a structure-based framework for de novo kinase inhibitor design that integrates a Geometry-Complete Diffusion Model with real-time AutoDock Vina gradient guidance. By injecting physics-based docking gradients into the diffusion denoising loop, KinetiDiff steers molecule generation toward high-affinity conformations for ACVR1 (ALK2), the causative kinase in Fibrodysplasia Ossificans Progressiva. From 10,000 diffusion samples, the framework produced 9,997 valid molecules. The best candidate achieved $-11.05$ kcal/mol (pKd = 8.10), a 19.2% improvement over the crystallographic reference. The top 100 candidates all exceed the reference, with 100% Lipinski compliance, median synthetic accessibility of 2.67, and internal diversity of 0.790. Systematic ablation across four guidance strategies--Vina-Direct (physics), HNN-Denovo (neural proxy), multi-objective, and unguided--demonstrates that real-time docking guidance dominates on all metrics. We evaluate HNN-Denovo as a computationally efficient alternative (60-fold speedup per step), revealing a domain-mismatch limitation (r = 0.224 correlation with Vina) that explains its inferior performance. These results establish gradient-guided geometric diffusion as a practical approach for generating potent, synthetically accessible inhibitors against rare-disease kinase targets.
title KinetiDiff: Docking-Guided Diffusion for De Novo ACVR1 Inhibitor Design in Fibrodysplasia Ossificans Progressiva
topic Chemical Physics
Machine Learning
I.2.6; I.5.1; I.5.4; J.3
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.20886