Can AI-Predicted Complexes Teach Machine Learning to Compute Drug Binding Affinity?
Wei-Tse Hsu, Savva Grevtsev, Anna M. Herz, Thomas Douglas, Aniket Magarkar, Philip Charles Biggin · Journal of Chemical Information and Modeling · 2025
We evaluate the feasibility of using co-folding models for synthetic data augmentation in training machine learning-based scoring functions (MLSFs) for binding affinity prediction. Our results show that performance gains depend critically on the structural quality of augmented data. In light of this, we established simple heuristics for identifying high-quality co-folding predictions without reference structures, enabling them to substitute for experimental structures in MLSF training. Our study informs future data augmentation strategies based on co-folding models.