Comparing to the experimental binding free energies, the MM-GBSA results led to correlation coefficients near 0 in Stage 1a (a Kendall's τ of 0.17, a Spearman's ρ of 0.22, and a Pearson's r of 0.2), meaning a disagreement between our predicted values and the experimental binding data. Similarly in Stage 2, the evaluation of the results shows that the correlation coefficients values are still low (a Kendall's τ of 0.01, a Spearman's ρ of 0.02, and a Pearson's r of 0.05) for this stage. In Stage 1a, our submission based on MM-GBSA method was ranked 8 th among 22 submissions (Fig. ). Regarding Stage 2, our submission was ranked 21 st among 31 submitted predictions (Fig. ). Also, the reported RMSE values are high for both Stage 1a (8.17 kcal/mol) and Stage 2 (8.14 kcal/mol). Consequently, the employed MM-GBSA scoring method is not correlated to the experimental relative binding affinity of the ligands.