Combined Molecular Graph Neural Network and Structural Docking Selects Potent Programmable Cell Death Protein 1/Programmable Death-Ligand 1 (PD-1/PD-L1) Small Molecule Inhibitors

The Programmable Cell Death Protein 1/Programmable Death-Ligand 1 (PD-1/PD-L1) interaction is an immune checkpoint utilized by cancer cells to enhance immune suppression. There exists a huge need to develop small molecules drugs that are fast acting, cheap, and readily bioavailable compared to antibodies. Unfortunately, synthesizing and validating large libraries of small-molecule to inhibit PD-1/PD-L1 interaction in a blind manner is a both time-consuming and expensive. To improve this drug discovery pipeline, we have developed a machine learning methodology trained on patent data to identify, synthesize and validate PD-1/PD-L1 small molecule inhibitors. Our model incorporates two features: docking scores to represent the energy of binding (E) as a global feature and sub-graph features through a graph neural network (GNN) to represent local features. This Energy-Graph Neural Network (EGNN) model outperforms traditional machine learning methods as well as a simple GNN with an average F1 score of 0.997 (± 0.004) suggesting that the topology of the small molecule, the structural interaction in the binding pocket, and chemical diversity of the training data are all important considerations for enhancing model performance. A Bootstrapped EGNN model was used to select compounds for synthesis and experimental validation with predicted high and low potency to inhibit PD-1/PD-L1 interaction. The new potent inhibitor, (4-((3-(2,3-dihydrobenzo[b][1,4]dioxin-6-yl)-2-methylbenzyl)oxy)-2,6-dimethoxybenzyl)-D-serine, is a hybrid of two known bioactive scaffolds, and has an IC₅₀ values of 339.9 nM that is comparatively better than the known bioactive compound. We conclude that our EGNN model can identify active molecules designed by scaffold hopping, a well-known medicinal chemistry technique and will be useful to identify new potent small molecule inhibitors for specific targets.