AnewDDE: An Agentic Drug Discovery Engine for Biomolecular Interaction Modelling and Closed-Loop Design

Abstract

Accurate modelling of biomolecular interactions is fundamental to drug discovery, yet current artificial intelligence (AI) workflows remain fragmented across structure prediction, affinity estimation, molecular design, and experimental decision-making. We introduce AnewDDE, an agentic Drug Discovery Engine that connects these capabilities into a closed-loop system for biomolecular interaction modelling and design. We demonstrate several components of this system: AnewFold delivers superior performance on challenging targets, including antibody-antigen complexes and molecular glues, providing more reliable structural hypotheses together with pocket identification and conformational analysis; AnewDesign achieves a 10.7% success rate in identifying binders with single-digit-nanomolar affinities measured by surface plasmon resonance (SPR) in a representative nanobody discovery campaign, substantially reducing the experimental search burden; AnewAffinity combines accuracy approaching that of free-energy perturbation (FEP) methods with the speed required for high-throughput screening and prioritizes promising transformations; and AnewMind, a large language model (LLM) at the hundred-billion-parameter scale that underwent in-house full-parameter post-training, provides scientific reasoning and absorption, distribution, metabolism, excretion, and toxicity (ADMET) prediction for pharmaceutical research and development (R&D). To systematically evaluate AnewMind, we introduce PharmBench, an internal benchmark designed by pharmaceutical R&D experts to evaluate long-horizon decision-making in drug discovery. Evaluations on ADMET tasks and PharmBench show that AnewMind performs competitively with leading frontier models. Together, these capabilities establish AnewDDE as an integrated engine for addressing challenging therapeutic targets and translating molecular insights into experimentally validated candidates at scale.