On the Selectivity of Generative Models in Structure-Based Drug Design

arXiv:2610.24124v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Designing small-molecule drugs that selectively bind to a target protein while avoiding unintended interactions with other proteins is essential for reducing side effects that contribute substantially to clinical attrition. Although structure-based drug design (SBDD) has advanced rapidly with deep learning, most generative models still optimize binding to a single target and disregard selectivity due to limited training data and unknown off-target interactions. Motivated by this gap, we introduce SELECTBENCH, a comprehensive benchmark assessing the selectivity of generative SBDD models. SELECTBENCH provides three curated evaluation tasks reflecting different real-world drug discovery scenarios: literature-based case studies, safety screening panels used in pharmaceutical development, and large-scale structure-based evaluation sets. We further introduce a suite of metrics to quantify selectivity and conduct a systematic evaluation of nine representative SBDD models, including methods explicitly trained for selectivity and widely-used inference-time guidance techniques. Our results show that even selectivity-trained models achieve only modest off-target discrimination and inference-time guidance provides limited gains, underscoring the need for method improvement. SELECTBENCH provides both a characterization of where current generative SBDD stands on selectivity and an open, extensible platform to accelerate progress. The benchmark is available at https://github.com/lovetaro/selectbench.

Abstract:Designing small-molecule drugs that selectively bind to a target protein while avoiding unintended interactions with other proteins is essential for reducing side effects that contribute substantially to clinical attrition. Although structure-based drug design (SBDD) has advanced rapidly with deep learning, most generative models still optimize binding to a single target and disregard selectivity due to limited training data and unknown off-target interactions. Motivated by this gap, we introduce SELECTBENCH, a comprehensive benchmark assessing the selectivity of generative SBDD models. SELECTBENCH provides three curated evaluation tasks reflecting different real-world drug discovery scenarios: literature-based case studies, safety screening panels used in pharmaceutical development, and large-scale structure-based evaluation sets. We further introduce a suite of metrics to quantify selectivity and conduct a systematic evaluation of nine representative SBDD models, including methods explicitly trained for selectivity and widely-used inference-time guidance techniques. Our results show that even selectivity-trained models achieve only modest off-target discrimination and inference-time guidance provides limited gains, underscoring the need for method improvement. SELECTBENCH provides both a characterization of where current generative SBDD stands on selectivity and an open, extensible platform to accelerate progress. The benchmark is available at this https URL.

Machine Learning (cs.LG); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI)

arXiv:2610.24124 [cs.LG]

(or arXiv:2610.24124v1 [cs.LG] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2610.24124 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

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On the Selectivity of Generative Models in Structure-Based Drug Design

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