BoltzMol-1: Towards Reliable Virtual Screening for Fast and Cost-Effective Hit Discovery

Abstract

We present BoltzMol-1, a small-molecule hit discovery pipeline, centered on an optimized version of Boltz-2, explicitly adapted for prospective discovery. Reliable hit discovery that generalizes across target classes (rather than only the well-characterized families that dominate existing ligand data) would broaden the range of biology accessible to small-molecule intervention and reduce reliance on resource-intensive high-throughput screening. Towards this goal, the system prioritizes compounds for rapid experimental validation by coupling model-driven ranking with streamlined procurement from commercial catalogs. To improve developability at the point of selection, we introduce a suite of ADMET models for kinetic solubility (logS), lipophilicity (logD), and Caco-2 permeability. These models act as an early triage layer, systematically filtering out compounds with unfavorable physicochemical and absorption properties prior to synthesis or purchase. Across a panel of ten targets (most with no representation in the underlying affinity training data) we observe strong prospective performance on challenging systems. Functional actives or binders were identified for 6 of 10 targets, despite modest experimental budgets of 28-96 compounds per target. These results include successes on receptors and enzymes traditionally considered difficult for structure- or ligand-based approaches. Collectively, this work establishes a practical framework for low-throughput, cost-constrained discovery campaigns capable of delivering chemically tractable binders with favorable property profiles. O_FIG O_LINKSMALLFIG WIDTH=200 HEIGHT=124 SRC="FIGDIR/small/736485v1_fig1.gif" ALT="Figure 1"> View larger version (50K): org.highwire.dtl.DTLVardef@1d7ff06org.highwire.dtl.DTLVardef@1a7fc7aorg.highwire.dtl.DTLVardef@1b0dc98org.highwire.dtl.DTLVardef@62b978_HPS_FORMAT_FIGEXP M_FIG O_FLOATNOFigure 1:C_FLOATNO Overview of the prospective virtual-screening campaigns across all targets. For each target, the panel shows the predicted protein-ligand complex together with the number of compounds tested, the number of confirmed actives/binders, and the assays used for screening and follow-up. C_FIG