For the hit identification we rely on the combination of different methods used and developed in our group. The workflow follows the visual inspection of all structures together with quality assessment in order to choose the most suitable virtual screening workflow.

Expansion of the co-crystallized fragments is planned to be done in parallel from two main approaches:

i) our in-house protocol Artificial Intelligence-driven Optimization of Ligands (AIOLI) that incorporates various enumeration methods: reaction-based (e.g. with Synthesia), Rgroup-based, scaffold hopping, and similarity searches in large chemical spaces (e.g. Ftrees and SpaceLight searches in the Enamine REAL Space) together with our in-house state of the art retrosynthesis tool CHAI ("Chemistry with Artificial Intelligence").

ii) use of molecular field-based method Ignite, developed jointly with Cresset, which allows tridimensional complementary searches for the hit identification process.

On both approaches the filtering of undesirable chemical matter will be applied using a large Bayer proprietary collection of structure filter definitions, grown over years with Bayer's Medicinal Chemistry knowledge. We will apply Bayer's in silico ADMET platform for additional filtering to find compounds suitable for lead-optimization.

Generated compounds will be further filtered and prioritized by Docking with Glide (Schrödinger Inc.) and Absolute Binding Free Energy Perturbation (ABFEP, Schrödinger Inc.).

• Pipeline Pilot (BioVia)
• Spark, Ignite (Cresset)
• Glide, ABFEP (Schrodinger)
• FlexX, Ftrees, SpaceLight (BioSolveIT)
• Synthesia (Univ. Hamburg) -> free for academic use
• Arthor (NextMove)