Boltzina: Efficient and Accurate Virtual Screening via Docking-Guided Binding Prediction with Boltz-2
Kairi Furui · Masahito Ohue
Abstract
In structure-based drug discovery, virtual screening using conventional molecular docking methods can be performed rapidly but suffers from limitations in prediction accuracy. Recently, Boltz-2 was proposed, achieving extremely high accuracy in binding affinity prediction, but requiring approximately 20 seconds per compound per GPU, making it difficult to apply to large-scale screening of hundreds of thousands to millions of compounds.This study proposes Boltzina, a novel framework that leverages Boltz-2's high accuracy while significantly improving computational efficiency.Boltzina achieves both accuracy and speed by omitting the rate-limiting structure prediction from Boltz-2's architecture and directly predicting affinity from AutoDock Vina docking poses.We evaluate on eight assays from the MF-PCBA dataset and show that while Boltzina performs below Boltz-2, it provides significantly higher screening performance compared to AutoDock Vina and GNINA.Additionally, Boltzina achieved up to 11.8$\times$ faster through reduced recycling iterations and batch processing.Furthermore, we investigated multi-pose selection strategies and two-stage screening combining Boltzina and Boltz-2, presenting optimization methods for accuracy and efficiency according to application requirements.This study represents the first attempt to apply Boltz-2's high-accuracy predictions to practical-scale screening, offering a pipeline that combines both accuracy and efficiency in computational biology.
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