PeptSol: A Translational Benchmark for Protected-Peptide Solubility in Drug Manufacturing
Alexander Arjun Lobo, Marc Saouda, Urvi Awasthi, Leonid Zhukov
Abstract
Liquid-phase peptide synthesis (LPPS) offers a scalable route to peptide manufacturing, but route development still depends on empirical solvent screens because each protected intermediate must be soluble for reaction and recoverable for purification. The protecting groups, terminal modifications, and noncanonical residues that govern this behaviour are poorly represented in existing peptide property benchmarks, limiting the ability to develop and rigorously evaluate molecular representation models for LPPS-relevant prediction tasks. We introduce PeptSol, an open benchmark of 1388 hand-curated protected-peptide solubility measurements with chemistry-aware splits. The measurements span only 84 parent sequences and 101 protected structures, and 92.5% come from a single historical programme. Across seven frozen molecular encoders, the best macro-F1 is 0.843 on binary solubility for the historical subset under a peptide-held-out split; the harder three-class ordinal task reaches 0.614 in that cell. No foundation model consistently outperforms a baseline combining chemical fingerprints with explicit molecular descriptors, and model rankings vary across prediction tasks and data splits. The dataset, evaluation protocol, and baselines establish a standard for measuring progress on molecular representations for synthesis-aware peptide developability.