ANUBI: A Platform for Affinity Optimization of Proteins and Peptides in Drug Design

The increasing availability of computational power is opening unprecedented opportunities in computational biology and drug design. Computer simulations based on physical models can now reproduce or replace critical biophysical experiments such as binding affinity evaluations in the drug screening process. Here we present ANUBI (Anubi Nexus for Understanding Binding Interactions), a software package that automates sequence space exploration and binding free energy calculations to optimize protein or peptide drug candidates for improved target binding. Starting from a user-provided molecular model of the drug-target interaction, ANUBI systematically evaluates point mutations in selected regions using Monte Carlo methodology, retaining favorable mutations based on calculated binding affinity differences. We demonstrate that this approach efficiently samples sequence space, generating dozens of optimized variants in timeframes comparable to experimental approaches at substantially reduced cost. As proof of concept, we applied ANUBI to an antibody-antigen complex and a peptide-protein interaction, identifying variants with significantly improved predicted binding energy (approximately 20 kcal/mol, calculated using the MMPBSA method), within 20 days of computation on a single GPU.