Small molecules targeting the structural dynamics of AR-V7 partially disordered protein using deep learning and physics based models

Partially disordered proteins can contain both stable and unstable secondary structure segments and are involved in various (mis)functions in the cell. The extensive conformational dynamics of partially disordered proteins scaling with extent of disorder and length of the protein hampers the efficiency of traditional experimental and in-silico structure-based drug discovery approaches. Therefore new efficient paradigms in drug discovery taking into account conformational ensembles of proteins need to emerge. In this study, using as a test case the AR-V7 transcription factor splicing variant related to prostate cancer, we present an automated methodology that can accelerate the screening of small molecule binders targeting partially disordered proteins. By swiftly identifying the conformational ensemble of AR-V7, and reducing the dimension of binding-sites by a factor of 90 by applying appropriate physicochemical filters, we combine physics based molecular docking and multi-objective classification machine learning models that speed up the screening of thousands of compounds targeting AR-V7 multiple binding sites. Our method not only identifies previously known binding sites of AR-V7, but also discovers new ones, as well as increases the multi-binding site hit-rate of small molecules by a factor of 10 compared to naive physics-based molecular docking.