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Iptd_Dtmf

Most oncogenic drivers — transcription factors, chromatin modifiers, scaffolds, DNA-repair proteins — are "occupancy-undruggable": they have no pocket a classical inhibitor can bind.

Core trick

A budget-aware scheduler ranks cheap network priors first, spends structure prediction top-down, then gates by lysine geometry and literature, logging every decision.

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Description

Most oncogenic drivers — transcription factors, chromatin modifiers, scaffolds, DNA-repair proteins — are "occupancy-undruggable": they have no pocket a classical inhibitor can bind. Induced proximity (molecular glues, bifunctional degraders) sidesteps this by recruiting the protein to an E3 ligase for degradation, but finding which driver→E3 pair is worth pursuing is a needle-in-a-haystack problem across a whole interactome. I built an autonomous agent that reasons over a cancer protein–protein interaction map to surface, for each undruggable driver, the ligandable E3 ligase(s) that could plausibly be recruited to degrade it — as a ranked, fully auditable list of hypotheses. It is a budget-aware scheduler, not a brute-force pipeline: a cheap network prior (path evidence × E3-tier × co-expression × compartment match) runs first, then a rationed structure-prediction step (Boltz-2 fast pass → AF3 sharpening) is spent top-down, then a lysine-geometry gate (catalytic-Cys → substrate-Lys for RBR ligases), then a literature falsifier pass that labels known degraders as positive controls and discards known negatives — each decision logged with provenance. Every score is a transparent multiplicative breakdown, never a bare scalar, and no PPI edge is ever fabricated (enforced by tests). During the hackathon I moved it from a synthetic demo onto real data. Using Claude Science I fetched the CCMI breast-cancer AP-MS interactome (Kim et al., Science 2021; NDEx + ProteomeXchange PXD019639/PXD025931), reshaped it into the agent's schema (522 proteins, 1,654 scored interactions), and annotated every node with UniProt subcellular localization, Open Targets small-molecule tractability, and E3-ligase tier — then layered in 2,449 experimentally-observed ubiquitylation sites and 14,904 phospho-sites from the matched PTM dataset. The Ub sites are real accessible lysines, so they can replace the agent's simulated geometry gate with measured evidence. What I found: 12 of the 39 drivers are undruggable or hard-to-drug, and they gain 478 tumor-specific interactions relative to normal breast cells. Filtering to undruggable/hard drivers with high-confidence tumor-specific partners yields 39 priority induced-proximity candidates. The standout is PALB2–KEAP1: a hard-to-drug DNA-repair driver acquiring a tumor-context interaction with a ligandable E3 substrate receptor — a genuine, testable degradation handle. The agent runs end-to-end on this real data with a per-hypothesis wet-lab test attached. Why it matters: it turns a raw interaction landscape into a short, checkable list of degrader hypotheses a bench scientist can act on — with auditability (every claim traces to a tool call) prioritized over completeness.
WeichengLite/Induced-Proximity-Target-Discover-Agent★ 00 forksPythonMITCreated Aug 2, 2025 · last push Jul 12, 2026

README excerpt

# Induced-Proximity Target-Discovery Agent

Reasons over a cancer protein–protein interaction (PPI) map to find where a
**bifunctional degrader or molecular glue** could create a *new* proximity
relationship — a "missing edge" — between an **occupancy-undruggable** oncogenic
driver and a **ligandable E3 ligase**.

For each undruggable driver in the (HNSCC) interactome, it surfaces a **ranked,
fully auditable** list of `driver → E3` hypotheses, each with an explicit network
path, a structural rationale, a per-factor score breakdown, and a one-line
falsifiable wet-lab test.

This repository is a runnable reference implementation of the agent spec in
[`docs/agent_prompt_spec.md`](docs/agent_prompt_spec.md).

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## Honest scope — what is real vs. modeled

The agent is designed to plug into real data and real structure predictors, but so
that it **runs end-to-end today** the defaults are clearly-labeled stand-ins:

| Component | Default in this repo | For real use |
|---|---|---|
| PPI network | **Synthetic** scaffold (`src/ipagent/data/hnscc_seed.json`) inspired by CCMI HNSCC (Swaney et al., *Science* 2021) | Export the real CCMI AP-MS graph in the same schema; `--data path.json` |
| `predict_interface` (Boltz-2/AF3) | **Simulated**, deterministic; every value tagged `simulated: true` and the model name carries `(SIMULATED)` | Register real backends on `StructureEngine` |
| `lysine_geometry` | **Simulated** | Real structure-derived measurement |
| Expression / literature | Hand

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