A New Paradigm for Applying Deep Learning to Protein-Ligand Interaction Prediction

Protein-ligand interaction prediction poses a significant challenge in the field of drug design. Numerous machine learning and deep learning models have been developed to identify the most accurate docking poses of ligands and active compounds against specific targets. However, the current models often suffer from inadequate accuracy and lack practical physical significance in their scoring systems. In this research paper, we introduce IGModel, a novel approach that leverages the geometric information of protein-ligand complexes as input for predicting the root mean square deviation (RMSD) of docking poses and the binding strength (the negative value of the logarithm of binding affinity, pKd) with the same prediction framework. By incorporating the geometric information, IGModel ensures that its scores carry intuitive meaning. The performance of IGModel has been extensively evaluated on various docking power test sets, including the CASF-2016 benchmark, PDBbind-CrossDocked-Core, and DISCO set, consistently achieving state-of-the-art accuracies. Furthermore, we assess IGModel's generalization ability and robustness by evaluating it on unbiased test sets and sets containing target structures generated by AlphaFold2. The exceptional performance of IGModel on these sets demonstrates its efficacy. Additionally, we visualize the latent space of protein-ligand interactions encoded by IGModel and conduct interpretability analysis, providing valuable insights. This study presents a novel framework for deep learning-based prediction of protein-ligand interactions, contributing to the advancement of this field.