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Accelerated rational PROTAC design via deep learning and molecular simulations

Nature Machine Intelligence volume 4, pages 739–748 (2022)Cite this article

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Abstract

Proteolysis-targeting chimeras (PROTACs) have emerged as effective tools to selectively degrade disease-related proteins by using the ubiquitin-proteasome system. Developing PROTACs involves extensive tests and trials to explore the vast chemical space. To accelerate this process, we propose a novel deep generative model for the rational design of PROTACs in a low-resource setting, which is then guided to sample PROTACs with optimal pharmacokinetics through deep reinforcement learning. Applying this method to the bromodomain-containing protein 4 target protein, we generated 5,000 compounds that were further filtered through machine learning-based classifiers and physics-driven simulations. As a proof of concept, we identified, synthesized and experimentally tested six candidate bromodomain-containing protein 4-degrading PROTACs, of which three were validated by cell-based assays and western blot analysis. One lead candidate was further tested and demonstrated favourable pharmacokinetics in mice. This combination of deep learning and molecular simulations may facilitate rational PROTAC design and optimization.

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Fig. 1: Approach overview.
Fig. 2: Performance of PROTAC-RL.
Fig. 3: In silico post-generation screening.
Fig. 4: Bioactivity and PK characterization.
Fig. 5: Binding mode analysis and atomistic simulation.

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Data availability

All data used in this paper are publicly available and can be accessed at http://cadd.zju.edu.cn/protacdb/ for the PROTAC-DB dataset, https://zinc15.docking.org/ for the ZINC dataset and https://www.rcsb.org for the protein crystal structure. Source data are provided with this paper.

Code availability

Demo, instructions and codes for PROTAC-RL are available at https://github.com/biomed-AI/PROTAC-RL.

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Acknowledgements

This study has been supported by the National Key R&D Program of China (2020YFB0204803, Y.Y.), National Natural Science Foundation of China (61772566, Y.Y.) and Guangdong Key Field R&D Plan (2019B020228001, Y.Y.; 2018B010109006, Y.Y.). We thank R. Hu, W. Lu, L. Shi and J. Zhang for helpful discussions.

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  1. These authors contributed equally: Shuangjia Zheng and Youhai Tan.

Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Computer Science and Engineering, Sun Yat-sen University, Guangzhou, China

    Shuangjia Zheng, Youhai Tan & Yuedong Yang

  2. Galixir Technologies, Beijing, China

    Shuangjia Zheng, Zhenyu Wang, Chengtao Li, Zhiqing Zhang & Xu Sang

  3. Guangzhou Laboratory, Guangzhou, China

    Hongming Chen

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Contributions

S.Z. and Y.Y. contributed the concept and experimental design. S.Z., Y.T. and C.L. contributed the code implementation. Z.W., X.S. and Y.T. contributed the development of the molecular simulations part. S.Z. and Q.Z. contributed to the wet experiment design. Y.Y., S.Z. and Y.T. wrote the manuscript. H.C participated in the discussion and revision of the manuscript. All authors contributed to the interpretation of the results. All authors reviewed and approved the final manuscript.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Yuedong Yang.

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Competing interests

S.Z., Z.W., C.L., Z.Z. and X.S. work directly or indirectly for Galixir. The remaining authors declare no competing interests.

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Nature Machine Intelligence thanks Guowei Wei and the other, anonymous, reviewer(s) for their contribution to the peer review of this work.

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Supplementary text, Figs. 1–9, Tables 1-6 and chemical synthesis and analytical data.

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Unprocessed western blots for Fig. 4d–f.

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Zheng, S., Tan, Y., Wang, Z. et al. Accelerated rational PROTAC design via deep learning and molecular simulations. Nat Mach Intell 4, 739–748 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s42256-022-00527-y

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