Small Molecule Approach to RNA Targeting Binder Discovery (SMARTBind) Using Deep Learning Without Structural Input.

ABSTRACT: Accurate identification of small molecule binders to RNA is critical for chemical probes and therapeutics. Computational approaches offer a cost-effective strategy to identify small molecules targeting RNA but are often limited by poor predictive accuracy and high computational demands. Here, we introduce Small Molecule Approaches to RNA Targeting Binder Discovery (SMARTBind), a structure-agnostic ligand discovery framework that combines an RNA large language model with contrastive learning and a ligand-specific decoy enhancement strategy. The RNA language model, pre-trained on millions of RNA sequences, together with the decoy enhancement strategy, addresses data scarcity and improves model generalizability. SMARTBind uses only RNA primary sequenc

SUBMITTER: Jiang S 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC12485756 | biostudies-literature | 2025 Sep

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature