Crystal Structure Prediction

In silico discovery of polymorphs using Al/ML & GPU acceleration 

Structural representation of Rotigotine (C19H25NOS)
I: 2D representation
II: Stable conformers
III: Stable polymorphs
Context

Accelerated free energy landscape scan

Identifying polymorphs with the desired physiochemical properties demand a comprehensive scan of the free energy landscape of an API molecule in its crystalline solid state.

This requires implementing computationally expensive Quantum mechanical/chemical methods. This expense is compounded multifold if the polymorph studies include salts, cocrystals, hydrates/solvates, etc.

Aganitha utilizes advanced AI/ML models in tandem with GPU-based QM software, all running on elastic/scalable cloud infrastructure, to aid in exploring the energetics of a range of candidate crystal structures within shorter time frames. These can serve as valuable computational aids in the formulation efforts of your product.

Our Solution

Scalable and accelerated in silico pipeline to identify stable polymorphs

Use our pipeline for a cost-effective in silico crystal structure screening. We combine Quantum chemistry with advances in Al/ML, Cloud & DevOps. Key features of our solution include:

  • Generative models to navigate the conformational space of an organic molecule
  • Diffusion based models to generate candidate crystal structures
  • Graph Neural Networks (GNN) based models to predict Lattice Energy
  • Accelerated DFT computational pipelines to screen candidate crystal structures
Crystal Structure Prediction pipeline

Key components of Aganitha's CSP Pipeline

Accurately predicting polymorphs of an Active Pharmaceutical Ingredient (API), is a key part of drug development. Conformer ensemble, which is a set of stable 3D conformations of a molecule are key inputs to CSP. Lattice Energy (LE) predictions using AI/ML-based models and accelerated DFT-based calculations are useful in the preliminary screening of CSP workflows.

Solution area

Conformer generation

Introducing Molecular Conformer Search with Unsupervised Learning (MolConSUL)—optimizes conformer generation, balancing accuracy with speed to streamline your CSP workflows.

Key Features: 

  • Computationally  affordable: Benchmarked to achieve the right balance between accuracy and computation time.
  • Captures conformational diversity: Captures the conformational diversity of APIs with a limited number of conformers in the final ensemble.
  • Customizable & modular platform: Provides a flexible platform that can be tailored to meet specific user requirements.

Why MolConSUL?

  • Superior performance for heavier molecules: For APIs with high molecular weight, determining the right conformers becomes challenging. MolConSUL significantly outperforms existing methods for heavier molecules such as new age, beyond rule of 5 (bRo5) drugs.
  • Comparable or better performance with fewer conformers: For lower molecular weight molecules, MolConSUL achieves similar or better results compared to existing methods. 
  • Small ensemble size: Only 10-20 conformers are sufficient to capture the diverse conformations occurring in crystal structures of APIs. This translates to significant time and resource savings in downstream CSP processes.
  • Successful sampling of challenging cases: When tested on a set of APIs that display conformational polymorphism, MolConSUL was able to identify all the conformers that are present in different polymorphs, while some of the SoA methods failed to identify certain conformers.
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Solution area

Lattice Energy Calculations

Fast and accurate LE prediction is vital for efficiently ranking and identifying the low energy crystal structures. We recognize the need and potential of accurate Deep Learning (DL) models in predicting LE for organic molecular crystals.

Our solution

  • To overcome the limitations, we are constructing a large dataset of computationally determined LE values for organic molecular crystals. We’ve conducted extensive benchmarking of different Quanted Mechanics (QM) based methods to identify a protocol that best balances accuracy and computational efficiency.
  • We are developing this comprehensive dataset, to pave the way for building robust and accurate LE prediction models. This will ultimately accelerate the preliminary screening.
Highlights

Key components of Aganitha’s Crystal Structure Prediction pipeline

Pipeline with comprehensive capabilities

Generation of diverse candidate crystal structures starting from multiple stable 3D conformers for a more comprehensive exploration of the crystal structure landscape

State of the art AI/ML tools & techniques

Diffusion models to generate candidate crystal structures and GNN based for Lattice Energy prediction models

System specific customization 

Modules built to leverage open-source packages, AI/ML models, GPU based QM packages

Outcomes

Swift and data safe polymorph discovery

Fast and Cost-effective

Diffusion models & GNN models drive identification of polymorphs thereby rapidly getting you to your end result.

Data Privacy and safety

We bring infrastructure as code to your data in your environment ensuring that your data is safe

Configurable and Scalable 

Scalable computational resources with on-demand cloud-based High Performance Computing (HPC) clusters workload management techniques

Download our case study on stable conformer identification

Discover our offerings across the biopharma value chain

Learn more about Crystal Structure Prediction