Probe Before You Edit: Probing-Guided Molecular Optimization for LLM Agents in Structure-Based Drug Design
About
Structure-based drug design increasingly employs LLM agents to iteratively refine ligands against a target pocket, yet a viable ligand must satisfy two often-conflicting objectives -- binding affinity and druggability -- which single optimization steps rarely improve together. To quantify this difficulty, we introduce two diagnostic metrics: the first measures how often a single edit improves both objectives, and the second measures how often a gain on one objective comes with a loss on the other. Applying these diagnostics to current LLM-agent pipelines exposes a consistent failure mode: the agent performs molecular editing without knowing how the pocket-ligand complex responds to local modifications, thus rarely achieving joint improvement. Inspired by medicinal chemists, who probe the pocket-ligand complex with controlled analog edits before choosing an optimization direction, we propose \textbf{PROBE}, an optimization framework built around edit-response probing. PROBE first decomposes the ligand into editable sites and builds a pocket-specific \textbf{site map} that flags where joint gains are plausible, where the two objectives are likely in tension, and where liability substructures should be changed; it then performs controlled probe edits whose responses are distilled into an \textbf{EditManual}. Guided by the site map and EditManual, PROBE runs an iterative multi-agent loop in which an affinity agent, a druggability agent, and a co-optimization agent jointly produce edits. On the CrossDocked2020 benchmark, PROBE achieves state-of-the-art performance and substantially mitigates the failure modes exposed by our diagnostics metrics.