Evolutionary exploration of drug-like chemical space utilizing generative AI and virtual screening

The identification of suitable lead molecules in the vast chemical space is a critical and challenging task in drug discovery campaigns. Recently, it has been demonstrated that large-scale virtual screening provides a powerful approach to accelerate the identification of novel drug candidates by screening ever increasing virtual ligand libraries, which have reached magnitudes of > 10 ²⁰ compounds. However, this desirable increase in potentially bioactive molecules poses a new challenge as enumerating and virtually screening such huge compound libraries is computationally prohibitive. Consequently, advanced approaches to navigate ultra-large chemical spaces and to identify suitable candidate molecules therein are urgently needed. Here, we present an evolutionary algorithm framework using molecular generative AI, reaction-based substructure searching, and iterative model fine-tuning for a targeted and efficient exploration of chemical fragment spaces. Combining this approach with large-scale virtual screening we are able to identify target-specific candidate molecules within the commercially available Enamine REAL Space (∼10 ¹⁵ ). We demonstrate the applicability of the approach by successfully identifying and biochemically validating pH-specific ligands of the µ -opioid receptor. Our results demonstrate that integrating generative AI with evolutionary algorithms provides a promising route to explore ultra-large chemical spaces for the discovery of novel, synthetically accessible lead molecules.