Teaching free energy calculations to learn from experimental data

Alchemical free energy calculations are an important tool in the computational chemistry toolbox, enabling the efficient calculation of quantities critical for drug discovery such as ligand binding affinities, selectivities, and partition coefficients. However, modern alchemical free energy calculations suffer from three significant limitations: (1) modern molecular mechanics force fields are limited in their ability to model complex molecular interactions, (2) classical force fields are unable to treat phenomena that involve rearrangements of chemical bonds, and (3) these calculations are unable to easily learn to improve their performance if readily-available experimental data is available. Here, we show how all three limitations can be overcome through the use of quantum machine learning (QML) potentials capable of accurately modeling quantum chemical energetics even when chemical bonds are made and broken. Because these potentials are based on mathematically convenient deep learning architectures instead of traditional quantum chemical formulations, QML simulations can be run at a fraction of the cost of quantum chemical simulations using modern graphics processing units (GPUs) and machine learning frameworks. We demonstrate that alchemical free energy calculations in explicit solvent are especially simple to implement using QML potentials because these potentials lack singularities and other pathologies typical of molecular mechanics potentials, and that alchemical free energy calculations are highly effective even when bonds are broken or made. Finally, we show how a limited number of experimental free energy measurements can be used to significantly improve the accuracy of computed free energies for unrelated compounds with no significant generalization gap. We illustrate these concepts on the prediction of aqueous tautomer free energies (related to tautomer ratios), which are highly relevant to drug discovery in that more than a quarter of all approved drugs exist as a mixture of tautomers.