Hello GPUGRID! You‘ve already noticed that a new app called “ATM” has been deployed with some test runs. We are working on its validation and deployment, so expect more jobs to come on this app soon. Let me briefly explain what this new app is about. The ATM application The new ATM application stands for Alchemical Transfer Method, a methodology Emilio Gallicchio et al. designed for absolute and relative binding affinity predictions. The ATM method allows us to estimate binding affinities for molecules against a specific protein, measuring the strength at which they bind. This methodology falls under the category of alchemical free energy calculation methods, where unphysical intermediate states are used to estimate the free energy of physical processes (such as protein-ligand binding). The benefits of ATM, when compared with other common free energy prediction methods (like the popular FEP), come from its simplicity, as it can be used with any forcefield and does not require a lot of expertise to make it work properly. Measuring experimental binding affinities between candidate molecules and the targeted protein is one of the first steps in drug discovery projects, but synthesizing molecules and performing experiments is expensive. Having the capacity to perform computational binding affinity predictions, particularly during drug lead optimization, is extremely beneficial. We are actively working now on testing and validating the ATM method so that we can start applying it to real drug discovery projects as soon as possible. Additionally, since these methods are usually applied to hundreds of molecules, it benefits a lot from the parallelization capabilities of GPUGRID, so if everything goes as expected, this could potentially send lots of work units. The ATM app is based on Python, similar to the PythonRL application, where we ship it with a specific python environment. Here are the two main references for the ATM method, for both absolute and relative binding affinity predictions: Absolute binding free energy estimation with ATM: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2101.07894.pdf Relative binding free energy estimation with ATM: https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.jcim.1c01129 For now we are only able to send jobs to Linux machines but we are hoping to have a Windows version soon.

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