Accuracy assessment and automation of free energy calculations for drug design

As the free energy of binding of a ligand to its target is one of the crucial optimization parameters in drug design, its accurate prediction is highly desirable. In the present study we have assessed the average accuracy of free energy calculations for a total of 92 ligands binding to five different targets. To make this study and future larger scale applications possible we automated the setup procedure. Starting from user defined binding modes, the procedure decides which ligands to connect via a perturbation based on maximum common substructure criteria and produces all necessary parameter files for free energy calculations in AMBER 11. For the systems investigated, errors due to insufficient sampling were found to be substantial in some cases whereas differences in estimators (thermodynamic integration (TI) versus multistate Bennett acceptance ratio (MBAR)) were found to be negligible. Analytical uncertainty estimates calculated from a single free energy calculation were found to be much smaller than the sample standard deviation obtained from two independent free energy calculations. Agreement with experiment was found to be system dependent ranging from excellent to mediocre (RMSE = [0.9, 8.2, 4.7, 5.7, 8.7] kJ/mol). When restricting analyses to free energy calculations with sample standard deviations below 1 kJ/mol agreement with experiment improved (RMSE = [0.8, 6.9, 1.8, 3.9, 5.6] kJ/mol).