Papers › PLAPT: Protein-Ligand Binding Affinity Prediction Using Pretrained Transformers

PLAPT: Protein-Ligand Binding Affinity Prediction Using Pretrained Transformers

8 Feb 2024bioRxiv 2024 2archive 2025-07-28

Tyler Rose, Nicolo Monti, Navvye Anand, Tianyu Shen

Understanding protein-ligand binding affinity is crucial for drug discovery, enabling the identification of promising drug candidates efficiently. We introduce PLAPT, a novel model leveraging transfer learning from pre-trained transformers like ProtBERT and ChemBERTa to predict binding affinities with high accuracy. Our method processes one-dimensional protein and ligand sequences, leveraging a branching neural network architecture for feature integration and affinity estimation. We demonstrate PLAPT's superior performance through validation on multiple datasets, achieving state-of-the-art results while requiring significantly less computational resources for training compared to existing models. Our findings indicate that PLAPT offers a highly effective and accessible approach for accelerating drug discovery efforts.

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Tasks

Drug DiscoveryPredictionProtein-Ligand Affinity PredictionTransfer Learning

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

TaskDatasetModelMetricValueRank at snapshotLeaderboardReport
Protein-Ligand Affinity Prediction CSAR-HiQ PLAPT RMSE 1.349 #2 of 3 Archive leaderboard report
Protein-Ligand Affinity Prediction PDBbind PLAPT RMSE 1.211 #2 of 7 Archive leaderboard report

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