Predicting Hydration Free Energies of the FreeSolv Database of Drug-like Molecules with Molecular Density Functional Theory

We assess the performance of molecular density functional theory (MDFT) to predict hydration free energies of the small drug-like molecules benchmark, FreeSolv. The MDFT in the hypernetted chain approximation (HNC) coupled with a pressure correction predicts experimental hydration free energies of the FreeSolv database within 1 kcal/mol with an average computation time of 2 cpu.min per molecule. This is the same accuracy as for simulation-based free energy calculations that typically require hundreds of cpu.h or tens of gpu.h per molecule.