With the recent explosion of chemical libraries beyond a billion molecules, more efficient virtual screening approaches are needed. The Deep Docking (DD) platform enables up to 100-fold acceleration of structure-based virtual screening by docking only a subset of a chemical library, iteratively synchronized with a ligand-based prediction of the remaining docking scores. This method results in hundreds-to thousands-fold virtual hit enrichment (without significant loss of potential drug candidates) and hence enables the screening of billion molecule-sized chemical libraries without using extraordinary computational resources. Herein, we present and discuss the generalized DD protocol that has been proven successful in various computer-aided drug discovery (CADD) campaigns and can be applied in conjunction with any conventional docking program. The protocol encompasses eight consecutive stages: molecular library preparation, receptor preparation, random sampling of a library, ligand preparation, molecular docking, model training, model inference and the residual docking. The standard DD workflow enables iterative application of stages 3-7 with continuous augmentation of the training set, and the number of such iterations can be adjusted by the user. A predefined recall value allows for control of the percentage of top-scoring molecules that are retained by DD and can be adjusted to control the library size reduction. The procedure takes 1-2 weeks (depending on the available resources) and can be completely automated on computing clusters managed by job schedulers. This open-source protocol, at https://github.com/jamesgleave/DD_protocol, can be readily deployed by CADD researchers and can significantly accelerate the effective exploration of ultra-large portions of a chemical space.

Deep learning-accelerated docking coupled with computational hit selection strategies enable the identification of inhibitors for the SARS-CoV-2 main protease from a chemical library of 40 billion small molecules.

Summary Deep learning (DL) can significantly accelerate virtual screening of ultra-large chemical libraries, enabling the evaluation of billions of compounds at a fraction of the computational cost and time required by conventional docking. Here we introduce DD-GUI, the graphical user interface for such DL approach we have previously developed, termed Deep Docking (DD). The DD-GUI allows for quick setups of large-scale virtual screens in an intuitive way, and provides convenient tools to track the progress and analyze the outcomes of a drug discovery project. Availability and Implementation DD-GUI is freely available with an MIT license on GitHub at https://github.com/jamesgleave/DeepDockingGUI Supplementary information Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.