Binding free energy calculations are increasingly used in drug discovery research to predict protein-ligand binding affinities and to prioritize candidate drug molecules accordingly. It has taken decades of collective effort to transform this academic concept into a technology adopted by the pharmaceutical and biotech industry. Having personally witnessed and taken part in this transformation, here I recount the (incomplete) list of problems that had to be solved to make this computational tool practical and suggest areas of future development.
Keywords: Binding free energy; Computational drug discovery; Free energy perturbation; Simulations.
© 2022. The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.