Jin Wang 王津
681 posts

Jin Wang 王津
@JinWangLab
Husband, Dad, Professor/Director. Chemical Biology, Drug Discovery, TPD, PROTACs, Molecular Glues, ADCs, Proteomics, & AI/ML. We do 💻🧪🧬 🐁 Views are my own.











AlphaFold3 in Drug Discovery: A Comprehensive Assessment of Capabilities, Limitations, and Applications 1. This paper presents the first large-scale benchmarking of AlphaFold3 (AF3) for real-world drug discovery tasks, revealing that AF3 excels at predicting static protein-ligand interactions but struggles with dynamic conformational changes, GPCR state prediction, and affinity ranking. 2. In static binary complexes, AF3 achieves high structural accuracy and outperforms traditional docking in side-chain orientation recovery, making it ideal for generating initial complex models when minimal conformational change is expected. 3. AF3 demonstrates clear limitations in modeling induced-fit scenarios: performance significantly drops for dynamic complexes (RMSD > 5Å), and predictions decline on structures released after its training cutoff, suggesting overreliance on memorization. 4. AF3 consistently predicts active GPCR conformations, even when modeling antagonist-bound states, revealing a systematic conformational bias that persists despite extensive sampling. 5. The model fails to reliably generate ternary complex structures such as those found in PROTAC or molecular glue systems, showing poor agreement with experimental data and low protein–protein interaction recovery. 6. AF3's internal ranking metrics (score and PAE) show no meaningful correlation with experimental binding affinity across a panel of sEH inhibitors, confirming it cannot be used for lead prioritization or virtual screening ranking. 7. Despite these limitations, AF3 performs well in chemoproteomics applications, accurately identifying binding pockets in 82% of known targets and generating high-confidence structures that align closely with experimental data. 8. The study introduces a dual-filtration strategy (AF3 score > 0.7 + GNINA docking < -5 kcal/mol) to select high-quality protein–ligand models from AF3 outputs, demonstrating utility in fragment-to-lead design. 9. AF3 captures resistance-driving steric clashes in BTK mutants, with ranking scores reflecting binding disruptions seen in experimental KD values—though it lacks sensitivity to subtler electronic effects. 10. However, AF3 fails to predict kinase selectivity across the human kinome, with ROC-AUCs near random for three benchmark inhibitors, indicating its inability to resolve subtle binding preferences without steric conflict. 11. The paper concludes that AF3 functions best as a “true-hit binary interaction modeler,” useful for generating structures of validated binders but not yet suitable for affinity ranking, ternary prediction, or broad selectivity profiling. 12. Future improvements should integrate enhanced conformational sampling, physics-based scoring (e.g., FEP+), and training on more diverse structural states. Hybrid pipelines combining AF3 with molecular dynamics and docking are proposed as the way forward. 💻Code: github.com/zhenglab-bcm/A… 📜Paper: biorxiv.org/content/10.110… #AlphaFold3 #DrugDiscovery #StructuralBiology #GPCR #TernaryComplexes #ProteinLigand #BindingAffinity #Bioinformatics #PROTAC #Chemoproteomics #AI4Science






