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Combinatorial docking and molecular generation to navigate over 100-billion molecules for prospective ligand discovery

Zhang, J.; Yang, C.; Zhang, Y.; Chen, X.; Lam, B.; Bryant, C.; Pidathala, S.; Wang, Y.; Moroz, Y.; Radchenko, D.; Alon, A.; Lee, C.-H.; Zhang, Z.; Lyu, J.

2026-06-11 bioinformatics
10.64898/2026.06.07.730716 bioRxiv
Show abstract

Commercially available make-on-demand libraries now exceed 100 billion compounds, requiring over 50 years to screen on 2,000 CPU cores using conventional docking. We present two complementary approaches to address this challenge. CombiDOCK, a combinatorial docking framework, enables exhaustive screening at the 100-billion scale within 40 days. MINT-Dock, a generative framework, accelerates navigation of this space by integrating CombiDOCK with Monte Carlo Tree Search. Benchmarked on 46 diverse targets, CombiDOCK matched full-molecule docking accuracy, and MINT-Dock achieved a 4,800-fold enrichment over random selection. Compared with prior billion-scale brute-force campaigns against {sigma}2, VMAT2, and VAChT, prospective CombiDOCK screens of the 100-billion-molecule library yielded higher hit rates and more potent ligands, while MINT-Dock achieved comparable outcomes across single- and multi-target objectives with >20-fold computational cost reductions. Docking-predicted poses of the best VAChT-binding compounds were confirmed by cryo-EM structures. These methods provide exhaustive and generative paths for navigating the trillion-molecule frontier of drug discovery.

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