Bayesian optimization for ternary complex prediction (BOTCP)

Proximity-inducing compounds (PICs) are an emergent drug technology through which a protein of interest (POI), often a drug target, is brought into the vicinity of a second protein which modifies the POI’s function, abundance or localisation, giving rise to a therapeutic effect. One of the best-known examples for such compounds are heterobifunctional molecules known as proteolysis targeting chimeras (PROTACs). PROTACs reduce the abundance of the target protein by establishing proximity to an E3 ligase which labels the protein for degradation via the ubiquitin-proteasomal pathway. Design of PROTACs in silico requires the computational prediction of the ternary complex consisting of POI, PROTAC molecule, and the E3 ligase.

We present a novel machine learning-based method for predicting PROTAC-mediated ternary complex structures using Bayesian optimization. We show how a fitness score combining an estimation of protein-protein interactions with PROTAC conformation energy calculations enables the sample-efficient exploration of candidate structures. Furthermore, our method presents two novel scores for filtering and reranking which take PROTAC stability (Autodock-Vina based PROTAC stability score) and protein interaction restraints (the TCP-AIR score) into account. We evaluate our method using DockQ scores on a number of available ternary complex structures (including previously unevaluated cases) and demonstrate that even with a clustering that requires members to have a high similarity, i.e., with smaller clusters, we can assign high ranks to those clusters that contain poses close to the experimentally determined native structure of the ternary complexes. We also demonstrate the resultant improved yield of near-native poses³ in these clusters.