DrugPipe: Generative artificial intelligence-assisted virtual screening pipeline for generalizable and efficient drug repurposing.

Abstract

Drug repurposing presents a promising strategy to accelerate drug discovery by identifying new therapeutic uses for existing compounds, particularly for diseases with limited or no effective treatment options. We introduce DrugPipe, a 'Generative AI-Assisted Virtual Screening Pipeline' developed within the target-centric paradigm of drug repurposing, which aims to discover new indications by identifying compounds that interact with a specific protein target. 'DrugPipe' integrates generative modeling, binding pocket prediction, and similarity-based retrieval from drug databases to enable a scalable and generalizable in silico repurposing workflow. It supports blind virtual screening for any protein target without requiring prior structural or functional annotations, making it especially suited for novel or understudied targets and emerging health threats. By efficiently generating candidate ligands and rapidly retrieving structurally similar approved drugs, 'DrugPipe' accelerates the identification and prioritization of repurposable compounds. In comparative evaluations, it achieves hit rate performance comparable to QVina-W, a widely used blind docking tool, while significantly reducing computational time, highlighting its practical value for large-scale virtual screening and data-scarce repurposing scenarios. The full implementation and evaluation details are available at https://github.com/HySonLab/DrugPipe.