Skip to content

Author

Odin Zhang

10 papers indexed here

We haven’t gathered this author’s papers yet. Follow them and we’ll fetch their work.

Not the right person? Other researchers publish under this name.

MetalloDock: Decoding Metalloprotein-Ligand Interactions via Physics-Aware Deep Learning for Metalloprotein Drug Discovery.

Accurate prediction of metalloprotein-ligand interactions is critical for metalloprotein-targeted drug discovery. Conventional docking tools and existing deep learning (DL) models fail to reliably capture metal-ligand interactions, hampering the discovery of potent metalloprotein inhibitors. Here, we propose MetalloDock, the first DL-based docking framework specially designed for metalloprotein targets. By innovatively integrating an autoregressive spatial decoding engine with a physics-constrained geometric generation paradigm, MetalloDock can precisely reconstruct metal coordination geometries and accurately capture metal-ligand interactions, which enhance both the accuracy of metalloprotein-ligand docking and binding affinity prediction. Extensive evaluations on our custom-built benchmark data set demonstrate that MetalloDock outperforms existing methods, including AlphaFold3, in docking success rate and virtual screening performance for metalloprotein targets. In real-world applications, MetalloDock successfully identified multiple novel hit compounds in a virtual screening campaign targeting the prostate-specific membrane antigen. Additionally, it enabled rational drug design for acidic polymerase endonuclease, leading to the discovery of potent inhibitors. These results highlight the broad applicability of MetalloDock in accelerating metalloprotein-targeted drug discovery and provide a standardized framework for future evaluation of metalloprotein-specific docking algorithms.

Hui Zhang, Xujun Zhang, Qun Su et al. · 5 citations
#natural language process... Open access Nov 2025

A virtual platform for automated hybrid organic-enzymatic synthesis planning

The integration of organic synthesis with enzymatic catalysis offers a promising route toward efficient and sustainable construction of complex molecules. While organic synthesis enables diverse transformations, enzymatic catalysis enhances stereoselectivity under mild conditions, improving cost-effectiveness and environmental impact. However, current enzymatic synthesis planning algorithms face challenges in formulating robust hybrid organic–enzymatic strategies. Key issues include the difficulty in devising hybrid planning approaches and the reliance on template-based enzyme recommendations, which limits their adaptability across diverse scenarios. Here we show ChemEnzyRetroPlanner, an open-source hybrid synthesis planning platform that combines organic and enzymatic strategies with AI-driven decision-making. The platform features advanced computational modules, including hybrid retrosynthesis planning, reaction condition prediction, plausibility evaluation, enzymatic reaction identification, enzyme recommendation, and in silico validation of enzyme active sites. A central innovation is the RetroRollout* search algorithm, which outperforms existing tools in planning synthesis routes for organic compounds and natural products across multiple datasets. ChemEnzyRetroPlanner provides an intuitive graphical interface and programmatic APIs for scalability, while leveraging the chain-of-thought strategy and the Llama3.1 model to autonomously activate hybrid synthesis strategies for diverse scenarios. The results indicate that this fully automated, open-source system holds potential value for improving the efficiency and sustainability of molecular synthesis. The integration of organic and enzymatic synthesis enhances molecule construction efficiency. Here, the authors present ChemEnzyRetroPlanner, an AI-driven platform for automated hybrid synthesis planning, improving synthesis route efficiency and sustainability.

Xiaorui Wang, Xiaodan Yin, Xujun Zhang et al. · 0 citations
#machine learning Open access May 2025

Token-Mol 1.0: tokenized drug design with large language models

The integration of large language models (LLMs) into drug design is gaining momentum; however, existing approaches often struggle to effectively incorporate three-dimensional molecular structures. Here, we present Token-Mol, a token-only 3D drug design model that encodes both 2D and 3D structural information, along with molecular properties, into discrete tokens. Built on a transformer decoder and trained with causal masking, Token-Mol introduces a Gaussian cross-entropy loss function tailored for regression tasks, enabling superior performance across multiple downstream applications. The model surpasses existing methods, improving molecular conformation generation by over 10% and 20% across two datasets, while outperforming token-only models by 30% in property prediction. In pocket-based molecular generation, it enhances drug-likeness and synthetic accessibility by approximately 11% and 14%, respectively. Notably, Token-Mol operates 35 times faster than expert diffusion models. In real-world validation, it improves success rates and, when combined with reinforcement learning, further optimizes affinity and drug-likeness, advancing AI-driven drug discovery. In this work the authors present Token-Mol, a token-only 3D drug design model, which deploys the Gaussian cross-entropy (GCE) loss function for regression tasks. It exhibits superior performance in molecular conformation generation, property prediction, and pocket-based generation, thus opening up new avenues for drug design.

Jike Wang, Rui Qin, Mingyang Wang et al. · 30 citations · ⚡1
#machine learning Open access Apr 2026

Accurate and task-agnostic modeling of enzymatic reactions through multimodal relational learning

Enzymatic reactions play an emerging role in a broad spectrum of scientific and industrial applications. The inherent complexity of enzymes, such as their substrate specificity, conformational flexibility, and the vast diversity of reactions involved, poses substantial challenges for the advanced computational prediction of enzymatic reactions with desirable accuracy. Moreover, existing approaches are mostly tailored for a specific sub-task, such as substrate prediction or binding site annotation, which limits their applicability. In this study, we introduce ERAM, a task-agnostic multimodal learning framework capable of addressing a broad range of downstream applications with both accuracy and efficiency. ERAM aligns pre-trained molecular representations from Protein Language Model with the knowledge of enzyme catalysis by modeling enzymatic reactions as multi-relational data. In enzyme retrieval tasks, ERAM achieves an improvement of 28.31% in mean average precision compared with the state-of-the-art (SOTA) method, CREEP. In substrate prediction tasks, ERAM outperforms the SOTA method ESP, achieving average improvements of 35.53% and 22.97% in Matthews correlation coefficient across two datasets. Additionally, ERAM exhibits commendable interpretability by assigning higher attention weights to binding sites, resulting in lower false-positive rates (42.36%) and higher overlap scores (70.59%) in the unsupervised binding site prediction task compared to RXNAA Mapper. By learning embeddings of substrates, enzymes, and products within a unified knowledge graph latent space, ERAM demonstrates its potential as a versatile and effective tool for enzyme catalysis research.

Yuansheng Huang, Lanqing Li, Wenjia Qian et al. · 2 citations
Preprint Aug 2026

EpiBench: Can LLMs Understand Epitopes for Antibody Drug Discovery?

The results show that current LLMs capture partial epitope-related signals but remain limited in antibody-specific sequence grounding, long-context residue localization, and biologically grounded reasoning, so EpiBench provides a diagnostic testbed for measuring and improving sequence-aware biomedical LLMs toward reliable LLM-assisted antibody discovery.

Zirui Wang, Jiaqing Wang, Qinghan Wang et al. · 0 citations

ProphDR: An Interpretable Deep Learning Model for Predicting Cancer Drug Response via Multi-Omics and Cross-Attention Mechanisms.

ProphDR is an interpretable deep learning framework that integrates multiomics data and drug structural information using a hierarchical attention mechanism, and generates biologically interpretable attention maps that highlight key pharmacophores and resistance-related genes consistent with established mechanisms in NSCLC and BRCA.

Yundian Zeng, Qing Ye, Jike Wang et al. · 0 citations
#artificial intelligence Review Jun 2026

Facilitating structure-based drug discovery with an artificial intelligence-driven virtual screening platform.

The Comprehensive VS Platform with AI Engine (CVSP-AIE) for drug discovery from compound libraries integrates three AI models: KarmaDock, a fast docking model that directly updates atomic coordinates; CarsiDock, an accurate docking model that predicts protein-ligand distances and reconstructs binding poses; and RTMScore, an accurate scoring model that learns residue-atom distance distributions for affinity prediction.

Shu-kai Gu, Xujun Zhang, Mengwu Xiao et al. · 1 citation
Open access Aug 2026

NACraft: Programmatic nucleic-acid aptamer design via all-atom structure-model feedback

NACraft, a training-free and programmatic framework for all-atom nucleic-acid aptamer design based on backpropagation through structure-model feedback, is presented, demonstrating the effectiveness and versatility of NACraft and extending structure-model hallucination toward programmatic nucleic-acid aptamer design.

Heqin Zhu, Jiaqi Wang, Weibo Zhao et al. · 0 citations