Back

Generative Access to Make-on-Demand Chemical Space Enables Ultra-Large Virtual Screening

Zhang, K.; Sun, Y.; Li, X.; Wang, Y.; Peng, C.; Jin, X.; Hu, Q.; Huang, J.

2026-09-23 bioinformatics
10.64898/2026.09.17.752345 bioRxiv
Show abstract

Ultra-large-scale virtual screening (ULVS) increasingly relies on make-on-demand chemical spaces, but efficient access to these spaces remains challenging because their scale far exceeds what can be exhaustively enumerated and docked. Here, we present REAL-SWIT, a generative ULVS framework that learns Enamine REAL Space as a synthesizable molecular distribution and couples this generator with a target-specific scoring model to enable docking-guided exploration of REAL Space at the level of complete molecule. The generative model learned transferable features of the REAL Space distribution: approximately 96% of generated molecules were found in REAL Space, and a subset of generated molecules absent from the training release appeared in later expanded releases. In computational benchmarks, REAL-SWIT identified more molecules with favorable docking scores than representative fragment-based search strategies, including cooperative building-block combinations that fragment-level prioritization tended to miss. Experimental validation for ROCK1 yielded six biochemical inhibitors among 23 synthesized compounds, including RX-3 with an IC50 of 0.17 M. These results establish generative access to make-on-demand chemical space as a practical strategy for ULVS.

Matching journals

The top 3 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.