TY - JOUR A1 - Gorgulla, Christoph A1 - Boeszoermnyi, Andras A1 - Wang, Zi-Fu A1 - Fischer, Patrick D. A1 - Coote, Paul A1 - Das, Krishna M. Padmanabha A1 - Malets, Yehor S. A1 - Radchenko, Dmytro S. A1 - Moroz, Yurii A1 - Scott, David A. A1 - Fackeldey, Konstantin A1 - Hoffmann, Moritz A1 - Iavniuk, Iryna A1 - Wagner, Gerhard A1 - Arthanari, Haribabu T1 - An open-source drug discovery platform enables ultra-large virtual screens JF - Nature N2 - On average, an approved drug today costs $2-3 billion and takes over ten years to develop1. In part, this is due to expensive and time-consuming wet-lab experiments, poor initial hit compounds, and the high attrition rates in the (pre-)clinical phases. Structure-based virtual screening (SBVS) has the potential to mitigate these problems. With SBVS, the quality of the hits improves with the number of compounds screened2. However, despite the fact that large compound databases exist, the ability to carry out large-scale SBVSs on computer clusters in an accessible, efficient, and flexible manner has remained elusive. Here we designed VirtualFlow, a highly automated and versatile open-source platform with perfect scaling behaviour that is able to prepare and efficiently screen ultra-large ligand libraries of compounds. VirtualFlow is able to use a variety of the most powerful docking programs. Using VirtualFlow, we have prepared the largest and freely available ready-to-dock ligand library available, with over 1.4 billion commercially available molecules. To demonstrate the power of VirtualFlow, we screened over 1 billion compounds and discovered a small molecule inhibitor (iKeap1) that engages KEAP1 with nanomolar affinity (Kd = 114 nM) and disrupts the interaction between KEAP1 and the transcription factor NRF2. We also identified a set of structurally diverse molecules that bind to KEAP1 with submicromolar affinity. This illustrates the potential of VirtualFlow to access vast regions of the chemical space and identify binders with high affinity for target proteins. Y1 - 2020 U6 - https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-020-2117-z VL - 580 SP - 663 EP - 668 PB - Springer Nature ER - TY - CHAP A1 - Kostre, Margarita A1 - Sunkara, Vikram A1 - Djurdjevac Conrad, Natasa T1 - Inference of historical influence networks T2 - International Conference on Complex Networks & Their Applications Proceedings N2 - We study the romanization process of northern Africa from 50 BC till 300 AD. Our goal is to infer the communication strength between different subregions, based on the evolution of the status of cities. Herefore, we use the general inverse infection model, that infers the weights of a known underlying network, given observations of the spreading on this network. As infection process we choose the SI metapopulation model, where I stands for a city with a Roman status. To solve the minimization problem we use the particle swarm optimization algorithm with a specific choice of parameters. Y1 - 2021 U6 - https://doi.org/10.12752/8558 SP - 110 EP - 113 ET - International Conference on Complex Networks & Their Applications ER -