Deep contrastive learning enables genome-wide virtual screening

Science. 2026 Jan 8;391(6781):eads9530. doi: 10.1126/science.ads9530. Epub 2026 Jan 8.

Abstract

Recent breakthroughs in protein structure prediction have opened new avenues for genome-wide drug discovery, yet existing virtual screening methods remain computationally prohibitive. We present DrugCLIP, a contrastive learning framework that achieves ultrafast and accurate virtual screening, up to 10 million times faster than docking, while consistently outperforming various baselines on in silico benchmarks. In wet-lab validations, DrugCLIP achieved a 15% hit rate for norepinephrine transporter, and structures of two identified inhibitors were determined in complex with the target protein. For thyroid hormone receptor interactor 12, a target that lacks holo structures and small-molecule binders, DrugCLIP achieved a 17.5% hit rate using only AlphaFold2-predicted structures. Finally, we released GenomeScreenDB, an open-access database providing precomputed results for ~10,000 human proteins screened against 500 million compounds, pioneering a drug discovery paradigm in the post-AlphaFold era.

MeSH terms

  • Deep Learning*
  • Drug Discovery* / methods
  • Genome, Human
  • Humans
  • Molecular Docking Simulation
  • Norepinephrine Plasma Membrane Transport Proteins / antagonists & inhibitors
  • Norepinephrine Plasma Membrane Transport Proteins / chemistry
  • Protein Conformation
  • Small Molecule Libraries* / analysis

Substances

  • Norepinephrine Plasma Membrane Transport Proteins
  • Small Molecule Libraries