Score: 2

MolFORM: Multi-modal Flow Matching for Structure-Based Drug Design

Published: July 7, 2025 | arXiv ID: 2507.05503v2

By: Jie Huang, Daiheng Zhang

Potential Business Impact:

Creates new medicines by designing molecules.

Business Areas:
Bioinformatics Biotechnology, Data and Analytics, Science and Engineering

Structure-based drug design (SBDD) seeks to generate molecules that bind effectively to protein targets by leveraging their 3D structural information. While diffusion-based generative models have become the predominant approach for SBDD, alternative non-autoregressive frameworks remain relatively underexplored. In this work, we introduce MolFORM, a novel generative framework that jointly models discrete (atom types) and continuous (3D coordinates) molecular modalities using multi-flow matching. To further enhance generation quality, we incorporate a preference-guided fine-tuning stage based on Direct Preference Optimization (DPO), using Vina score as a reward signal. We propose a multi-modal flow DPO co-modeling strategy that simultaneously aligns discrete and continuous modalities, leading to consistent improvements across multiple evaluation metrics. The code is provided at: https://github.com/huang3170/MolForm.

Country of Origin
🇺🇸 United States

Repos / Data Links

Page Count
10 pages

Category
Computer Science:
Computational Engineering, Finance, and Science