Back

From hotspot dependence to distributed robustness in resistance-aware lead optimization

Wang, Y.; Xiao, B.; Kang, J.; Cui, H.; Fu, Y.; Li, W.; Perea, S. E.; Han, W.

2026-06-22 bioinformatics
10.64898/2026.06.16.732538 bioRxiv
Show abstract

Drug resistance remains a recurrent failure mode in targeted anticancer and antiviral therapy, and resistance evidence often enters only after compound selection. ResistAgent is an evidence-constrained framework that converts mutational liabilities into design-time objectives through site- and combo-aware resistance mapping, deterministic mechanism diagnosis and robust counter-design. In EGFR-Erlotinib and HIV-RT-Rilpivirine, the framework separated residue-level liabilities from observed HIV combination liabilities and linked prioritized mutations to anchor loss, pocket rearrangement, electrostatic shifts and contact redistribution. Same-budget paired searches showed that robust objectives changed lower-tail mutant-panel behavior and interaction-dependence profiles while prioritizing robustness over average-affinity behavior. Under predefined liability panels, robust-objective trajectories shifted support away from mutable hotspot contacts toward more distributed interaction networks. Supplementary physical summaries and ranking-first benchmarks support the validation envelope of this resistance-aware design strategy.

Matching journals

The top 4 journals account for 50% of the predicted probability mass.

50% of probability mass above

"Similar papers" are the closest papers from that journal in the model's embedding space. They show what the match is built on, but the ranking comes mostly from a classifier over the whole training set, not from these examples alone.