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Research

Peer-reviewed publications from the DrugSynq team.

All performance claims on this site trace to published papers. Preprints are linked until peer review is complete.

Journal Articles

Peer-reviewed papers.

J. Chem. Inf. Model. 2025

Prospective Validation of Alchemical Free Energy Perturbation Binding Affinity Predictions Across 14 Clinical Targets

Patel M, Krishnamurthy R, Chen S, Andersen MR.

We report a prospective benchmark of relative binding free energy calculations using the DrugSynq FEP pipeline across 312 congeneric pairs from 14 clinical targets. The pipeline achieved r²=0.82 (RMSE=1.02 kcal/mol) on the held-out test set. Outlier analysis identifies scaffold-hop perturbations as the primary failure mode. Evaluation code and test set SMILES are published in the SI.

JACS Au 2024

Ensemble ADMET Prediction Models with Prospective Performance in Lead Optimization Campaigns

Chen S, Patel M, Krishnamurthy R.

We introduce an ensemble gradient-boosted model architecture for ADMET prediction trained on 247,000 curated in vitro data points across 12 endpoints. Prospective AUROC values range from 0.85–0.91 across endpoints. We compare performance against publicly available ADMET tools on the same held-out sets and discuss training data curation methodology.

J. Comput. Chem. 2023

Machine-Learned Correction Terms for OPLS4 Free Energy Perturbation Calculations on Drug-Like Heterocycles

Krishnamurthy R, Patel M.

We present a hybrid approach combining OPLS4 molecular mechanics with ML correction terms trained on high-level QM reference data for 18,000 drug-like conformers. The ΔML correction reduces RMSE by 0.3 kcal/mol on kinase target test sets relative to OPLS4 alone. Implementation details and training data are open-sourced.

Conference Presentations

Talks and posters.

2025
Free Energy Perturbation at Production Scale: Lessons from 14 Targets
ACS National Meeting — Spring 2025. Invited talk, Computational Chemistry Symposium. Dr. Maya Patel.
2025
Ensemble ADMET Models for Early-Stage Lead Optimization: A Prospective Study
AAPS PharmSci 360 — San Diego, 2025. Platform presentation. Dr. Sophie Chen.
2024
GPU-Accelerated FEP Perturbation Networks: Infrastructure for Small Drug Discovery Teams
Supercomputing SC24 — Poster. Ravi Krishnamurthy, Marcus Andersen.
2024
Prospective Benchmarking of OPLS4 + ΔML Correction for Kinase Binding Affinity Prediction
ACS Fall 2024 — Symposium on Multiscale Modeling. Dr. Maya Patel.