Generative Drug Design in a Loop with dtSFM

Abstract

Directed evolution consisting of iterative rounds of diversification, selection, and counter-selection, underlies modern protein and antibody engineering, yet small-molecule drug design still advances largely through high-throughput screening and medicinal-chemistry intuition. Transformer softmax attention is mathematically identical to the Boltzmann distribution that governs molecular binding at thermal equilibrium1, an isomorphism that prescribes a sequence-native Specificity Foundation Model (SFM)2. This framework was recently applied across seven molecular recognition domains3,4 and scaled into the drug-target SFM (dtSFM), the first to pair a full-scale encoder with a generative decoder5. Whether such a model can be driven, iteratively and under selection, to optimize leads rather than sample them once has not been shown. Here we present GenLoop, a closed generative drug design loop that turns single-pass generation into directed evolution of chemistry. dtSFM generates target-conditioned molecules and reranks them by their thermodynamic compatibility score. An orthogonal structural verifier, AlphaFold 3, is used that shares no architecture or training data with dtSFM. Cheminformatics filters enforce developability, and generative evolution is performed on the structurally verified candidates, selecting for predicted binders and counter-selecting against off-target chemistry. Applied across twelve drug targets spanning pharmacologically distinct mechanism classes, GenLoop produced AlphaFold 3-verified designs that reached the structural confidence of the approved drug for five of the twelve targets, with the best designs at interface iPTM 0.93-0.98 and PAE 0.8-2.0 [A], as well as resolving paralog selectivity across nine targets. Two full disease campaigns followed. For the cystic-fibrosis transmembrane conductance regulator, GenLoop designed nine developability-filtered and structurally novel lead candidates (iPTM up to 0.93, interface PAE 2.3 [A]) targeting all three orthogonal sites of the approved drug Trikafta. For the GLP-1 receptor family, dtSFM engineered tunable single-, dual-, and triple-receptor incretin designs, yielding 23 central-pocket candidates that are structurally novel at median iPTM 0.89 and interface PAE 1.95 [A]. GenLoop with dtSFM brings directed evolution to small molecules through computational-thermodynamic selection; wet-lab validation is the immediate next step.