1
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El Salamouni NS, Cater JH, Spenkelink LM, Yu H. Nanobody engineering: computational modelling and design for biomedical and therapeutic applications. FEBS Open Bio 2024. [PMID: 38898362 DOI: 10.1002/2211-5463.13850] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Grants] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 04/05/2024] [Revised: 05/25/2024] [Accepted: 06/10/2024] [Indexed: 06/21/2024] Open
Abstract
Nanobodies, the smallest functional antibody fragment derived from camelid heavy-chain-only antibodies, have emerged as powerful tools for diverse biomedical applications. In this comprehensive review, we discuss the structural characteristics, functional properties, and computational approaches driving the design and optimisation of synthetic nanobodies. We explore their unique antigen-binding domains, highlighting the critical role of complementarity-determining regions in target recognition and specificity. This review further underscores the advantages of nanobodies over conventional antibodies from a biosynthesis perspective, including their small size, stability, and solubility, which make them ideal candidates for economical antigen capture in diagnostics, therapeutics, and biosensing. We discuss the recent advancements in computational methods for nanobody modelling, epitope prediction, and affinity maturation, shedding light on their intricate antigen-binding mechanisms and conformational dynamics. Finally, we examine a direct example of how computational design strategies were implemented for improving a nanobody-based immunosensor, known as a Quenchbody. Through combining experimental findings and computational insights, this review elucidates the transformative impact of nanobodies in biotechnology and biomedical research, offering a roadmap for future advancements and applications in healthcare and diagnostics.
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Affiliation(s)
- Nehad S El Salamouni
- Molecular Horizons and School of Chemistry and Molecular Bioscience, University of Wollongong, Australia
| | - Jordan H Cater
- Molecular Horizons and School of Chemistry and Molecular Bioscience, University of Wollongong, Australia
| | - Lisanne M Spenkelink
- Molecular Horizons and School of Chemistry and Molecular Bioscience, University of Wollongong, Australia
| | - Haibo Yu
- Molecular Horizons and School of Chemistry and Molecular Bioscience, University of Wollongong, Australia
- ARC Centre of Excellence in Quantum Biotechnology, University of Wollongong, Australia
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2
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Cheng J, Liang T, Xie XQ, Feng Z, Meng L. A new era of antibody discovery: an in-depth review of AI-driven approaches. Drug Discov Today 2024; 29:103984. [PMID: 38642702 DOI: 10.1016/j.drudis.2024.103984] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [MESH Headings] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 10/12/2023] [Revised: 04/02/2024] [Accepted: 04/15/2024] [Indexed: 04/22/2024]
Abstract
Given their high affinity and specificity for a range of macromolecules, antibodies are widely used in the treatment of autoimmune diseases, cancers, inflammatory diseases, and Alzheimer's disease (AD). Traditional experimental methods are time-consuming, expensive, and labor-intensive. Recent advances in artificial intelligence (AI) technologies provide complementary methods that can reduce the time and costs required for antibody design by minimizing failures and increasing the success rate of experimental tests. In this review, we scrutinize the plethora of AI-driven methodologies that have been deployed over the past 4 years for modeling antibody structures, predicting antibody-antigen interactions, optimizing antibody affinity, and generating novel antibody candidates. We also briefly address the challenges faced in integrating AI-based models with traditional antibody discovery pipelines and highlight the potential future directions in this burgeoning field.
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Affiliation(s)
- Jin Cheng
- School of Pharmacy, Jiangsu Vocational College of Medicine, Yancheng, 224005, China
| | - Tianjian Liang
- Department of Pharmaceutical Sciences, Computational Chemical Genomics Screening Center, and Pharmacometrics & System Pharmacology PharmacoAnalytics, School of Pharmacy, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA 15261, USA; Center of Excellence for Computational Drug Abuse Research, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA 15261, USA
| | - Xiang-Qun Xie
- Department of Pharmaceutical Sciences, Computational Chemical Genomics Screening Center, and Pharmacometrics & System Pharmacology PharmacoAnalytics, School of Pharmacy, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA 15261, USA; Center of Excellence for Computational Drug Abuse Research, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA 15261, USA; Drug Discovery Institute, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA 15261, USA; Department of Computational Biology, School of Medicine, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA 15261, USA; Department of Structural Biology, School of Medicine, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA 15261, USA.
| | - Zhiwei Feng
- Department of Pharmaceutical Sciences, Computational Chemical Genomics Screening Center, and Pharmacometrics & System Pharmacology PharmacoAnalytics, School of Pharmacy, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA 15261, USA; Center of Excellence for Computational Drug Abuse Research, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA 15261, USA.
| | - Li Meng
- School of Pharmacy, Jiangsu Vocational College of Medicine, Yancheng, 224005, China.
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3
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Joubbi S, Micheli A, Milazzo P, Maccari G, Ciano G, Cardamone D, Medini D. Antibody design using deep learning: from sequence and structure design to affinity maturation. Brief Bioinform 2024; 25:bbae307. [PMID: 38960409 PMCID: PMC11221890 DOI: 10.1093/bib/bbae307] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [MESH Headings] [Grants] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 03/03/2024] [Revised: 05/20/2024] [Accepted: 06/12/2024] [Indexed: 07/05/2024] Open
Abstract
Deep learning has achieved impressive results in various fields such as computer vision and natural language processing, making it a powerful tool in biology. Its applications now encompass cellular image classification, genomic studies and drug discovery. While drug development traditionally focused deep learning applications on small molecules, recent innovations have incorporated it in the discovery and development of biological molecules, particularly antibodies. Researchers have devised novel techniques to streamline antibody development, combining in vitro and in silico methods. In particular, computational power expedites lead candidate generation, scaling and potential antibody development against complex antigens. This survey highlights significant advancements in protein design and optimization, specifically focusing on antibodies. This includes various aspects such as design, folding, antibody-antigen interactions docking and affinity maturation.
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Affiliation(s)
- Sara Joubbi
- Department of Computer Science, University of Pisa, Largo B. Pontecorvo, 3, 56127, Pisa, Italy
- Data Science for Health (DaScH) Lab, Fondazione Toscana Life Sciences, Via Fiorentina, 1, 53100, Siena, Italy
| | - Alessio Micheli
- Department of Computer Science, University of Pisa, Largo B. Pontecorvo, 3, 56127, Pisa, Italy
| | - Paolo Milazzo
- Department of Computer Science, University of Pisa, Largo B. Pontecorvo, 3, 56127, Pisa, Italy
| | - Giuseppe Maccari
- Data Science for Health (DaScH) Lab, Fondazione Toscana Life Sciences, Via Fiorentina, 1, 53100, Siena, Italy
| | - Giorgio Ciano
- Data Science for Health (DaScH) Lab, Fondazione Toscana Life Sciences, Via Fiorentina, 1, 53100, Siena, Italy
| | - Dario Cardamone
- Data Science for Health (DaScH) Lab, Fondazione Toscana Life Sciences, Via Fiorentina, 1, 53100, Siena, Italy
| | - Duccio Medini
- Data Science for Health (DaScH) Lab, Fondazione Toscana Life Sciences, Via Fiorentina, 1, 53100, Siena, Italy
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4
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Jin R, Ye Q, Wang J, Cao Z, Jiang D, Wang T, Kang Y, Xu W, Hsieh CY, Hou T. AttABseq: an attention-based deep learning prediction method for antigen-antibody binding affinity changes based on protein sequences. Brief Bioinform 2024; 25:bbae304. [PMID: 38960407 PMCID: PMC11221889 DOI: 10.1093/bib/bbae304] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [MESH Headings] [Grants] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 11/09/2023] [Revised: 04/15/2024] [Accepted: 06/11/2024] [Indexed: 07/05/2024] Open
Abstract
The optimization of therapeutic antibodies through traditional techniques, such as candidate screening via hybridoma or phage display, is resource-intensive and time-consuming. In recent years, computational and artificial intelligence-based methods have been actively developed to accelerate and improve the development of therapeutic antibodies. In this study, we developed an end-to-end sequence-based deep learning model, termed AttABseq, for the predictions of the antigen-antibody binding affinity changes connected with antibody mutations. AttABseq is a highly efficient and generic attention-based model by utilizing diverse antigen-antibody complex sequences as the input to predict the binding affinity changes of residue mutations. The assessment on the three benchmark datasets illustrates that AttABseq is 120% more accurate than other sequence-based models in terms of the Pearson correlation coefficient between the predicted and experimental binding affinity changes. Moreover, AttABseq also either outperforms or competes favorably with the structure-based approaches. Furthermore, AttABseq consistently demonstrates robust predictive capabilities across a diverse array of conditions, underscoring its remarkable capacity for generalization across a wide spectrum of antigen-antibody complexes. It imposes no constraints on the quantity of altered residues, rendering it particularly applicable in scenarios where crystallographic structures remain unavailable. The attention-based interpretability analysis indicates that the causal effects of point mutations on antibody-antigen binding affinity changes can be visualized at the residue level, which might assist automated antibody sequence optimization. We believe that AttABseq provides a fiercely competitive answer to therapeutic antibody optimization.
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Affiliation(s)
- Ruofan Jin
- College of Pharmaceutical Science, Innovation Institute for Artificial Intelligence in Medicine of Zhejiang University, Zhejiang University, Yuhangtang Road 866, Hangzhou 310058, Zhejiang, China
- College of Life Science, Zhejiang University, Yuhangtang Road 866, Hangzhou 310058, Zhejiang, China
| | - Qing Ye
- College of Pharmaceutical Science, Innovation Institute for Artificial Intelligence in Medicine of Zhejiang University, Zhejiang University, Yuhangtang Road 866, Hangzhou 310058, Zhejiang, China
| | - Jike Wang
- College of Pharmaceutical Science, Innovation Institute for Artificial Intelligence in Medicine of Zhejiang University, Zhejiang University, Yuhangtang Road 866, Hangzhou 310058, Zhejiang, China
| | - Zheng Cao
- College of Computer Science and Technology, Zhejiang University, Yuhangtang Road 866, Hangzhou 310058, Zhejiang, China
| | - Dejun Jiang
- College of Pharmaceutical Science, Innovation Institute for Artificial Intelligence in Medicine of Zhejiang University, Zhejiang University, Yuhangtang Road 866, Hangzhou 310058, Zhejiang, China
| | - Tianyue Wang
- College of Pharmaceutical Science, Innovation Institute for Artificial Intelligence in Medicine of Zhejiang University, Zhejiang University, Yuhangtang Road 866, Hangzhou 310058, Zhejiang, China
| | - Yu Kang
- College of Pharmaceutical Science, Innovation Institute for Artificial Intelligence in Medicine of Zhejiang University, Zhejiang University, Yuhangtang Road 866, Hangzhou 310058, Zhejiang, China
| | - Wanting Xu
- College of Pharmaceutical Science, Innovation Institute for Artificial Intelligence in Medicine of Zhejiang University, Zhejiang University, Yuhangtang Road 866, Hangzhou 310058, Zhejiang, China
| | - Chang-Yu Hsieh
- College of Pharmaceutical Science, Innovation Institute for Artificial Intelligence in Medicine of Zhejiang University, Zhejiang University, Yuhangtang Road 866, Hangzhou 310058, Zhejiang, China
| | - Tingjun Hou
- College of Pharmaceutical Science, Innovation Institute for Artificial Intelligence in Medicine of Zhejiang University, Zhejiang University, Yuhangtang Road 866, Hangzhou 310058, Zhejiang, China
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5
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Gordon GL, Raybould MIJ, Wong A, Deane CM. Prospects for the computational humanization of antibodies and nanobodies. Front Immunol 2024; 15:1399438. [PMID: 38812514 PMCID: PMC11133524 DOI: 10.3389/fimmu.2024.1399438] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [MESH Headings] [Track Full Text] [Figures] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 03/11/2024] [Accepted: 05/02/2024] [Indexed: 05/31/2024] Open
Abstract
To be viable therapeutics, antibodies must be tolerated by the human immune system. Rational approaches to reduce the risk of unwanted immunogenicity involve maximizing the 'humanness' of the candidate drug. However, despite the emergence of new discovery technologies, many of which start from entirely human gene fragments, most antibody therapeutics continue to be derived from non-human sources with concomitant humanization to increase their human compatibility. Early experimental humanization strategies that focus on CDR loop grafting onto human frameworks have been critical to the dominance of this discovery route but do not consider the context of each antibody sequence, impacting their success rate. Other challenges include the simultaneous optimization of other drug-like properties alongside humanness and the humanization of fundamentally non-human modalities such as nanobodies. Significant efforts have been made to develop in silico methodologies able to address these issues, most recently incorporating machine learning techniques. Here, we outline these recent advancements in antibody and nanobody humanization, focusing on computational strategies that make use of the increasing volume of sequence and structural data available and the validation of these tools. We highlight that structural distinctions between antibodies and nanobodies make the application of antibody-focused in silico tools to nanobody humanization non-trivial. Furthermore, we discuss the effects of humanizing mutations on other essential drug-like properties such as binding affinity and developability, and methods that aim to tackle this multi-parameter optimization problem.
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Affiliation(s)
| | | | | | - Charlotte M. Deane
- Oxford Protein Informatics Group, Department of Statistics, University of Oxford, Oxford, United Kingdom
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6
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Hadsund JT, Satława T, Janusz B, Shan L, Zhou L, Röttger R, Krawczyk K. nanoBERT: a deep learning model for gene agnostic navigation of the nanobody mutational space. BIOINFORMATICS ADVANCES 2024; 4:vbae033. [PMID: 38560554 PMCID: PMC10978573 DOI: 10.1093/bioadv/vbae033] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Track Full Text] [Figures] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 10/25/2023] [Revised: 02/05/2024] [Accepted: 03/04/2024] [Indexed: 04/04/2024]
Abstract
Motivation Nanobodies are a subclass of immunoglobulins, whose binding site consists of only one peptide chain, bestowing favorable biophysical properties. Recently, the first nanobody therapy was approved, paving the way for further clinical applications of this antibody format. Further development of nanobody-based therapeutics could be streamlined by computational methods. One of such methods is infilling-positional prediction of biologically feasible mutations in nanobodies. Being able to identify possible positional substitutions based on sequence context, facilitates functional design of such molecules. Results Here we present nanoBERT, a nanobody-specific transformer to predict amino acids in a given position in a query sequence. We demonstrate the need to develop such machine-learning based protocol as opposed to gene-specific positional statistics since appropriate genetic reference is not available. We benchmark nanoBERT with respect to human-based language models and ESM-2, demonstrating the benefit for domain-specific language models. We also demonstrate the benefit of employing nanobody-specific predictions for fine-tuning on experimentally measured thermostability dataset. We hope that nanoBERT will help engineers in a range of predictive tasks for designing therapeutic nanobodies. Availability and implementation https://huggingface.co/NaturalAntibody/.
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Affiliation(s)
| | | | | | - Lu Shan
- Alector Therapeutics, San Francisco, CA, 94080, United States
| | - Li Zhou
- Alector Therapeutics, San Francisco, CA, 94080, United States
| | - Richard Röttger
- Department Mathematics and Computer Science, University of Southern, Odense, 5230, Denmark
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7
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Hong L, Kortemme T. An integrative approach to protein sequence design through multiobjective optimization. BIORXIV : THE PREPRINT SERVER FOR BIOLOGY 2024:2024.03.01.582670. [PMID: 38496480 PMCID: PMC10942313 DOI: 10.1101/2024.03.01.582670] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Grants] [Track Full Text] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Indexed: 03/19/2024]
Abstract
With recent methodological advances in the field of computational protein design, in particular those based on deep learning, there is an increasing need for frameworks that allow for coherent, direct integration of different models and objective functions into the generative design process. Here we demonstrate how evolutionary multiobjective optimization techniques can be adapted to provide such an approach. With the established Non-dominated Sorting Genetic Algorithm II (NSGA-II) as the optimization framework, we use AlphaFold2 and ProteinMPNN confidence metrics to define the objective space, and a mutation operator composed of ESM-1v and ProteinMPNN to rank and then redesign the least favorable positions. Using the multistate design problem of the foldswitching protein RfaH as an in-depth case study, we show that the evolutionary multiobjective optimization approach leads to significant reduction in the bias and variance in RfaH native sequence recovery, compared to a direct application of ProteinMPNN. We suggest that this improvement is due to three factors: (i) the use of an informative mutation operator that accelerates the sequence space exploration, (ii) the parallel, iterative design process inherent to the genetic algorithm that improves upon the ProteinMPNN autoregressive sequence decoding scheme, and (iii) the explicit approximation of the Pareto front that leads to optimal design candidates representing diverse tradeoff conditions. We anticipate this approach to be readily adaptable to different models and broadly relevant for protein design tasks with complex specifications.
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Affiliation(s)
- Lu Hong
- Department of Bioengineering and Therapeutic Sciences, University of California, San Francisco, San Francisco, CA 94158, USA
| | - Tanja Kortemme
- Department of Bioengineering and Therapeutic Sciences, University of California, San Francisco, San Francisco, CA 94158, USA
- Quantitative Biosciences Institute, University of California, San Francisco, San Francisco, CA 94158, USA
- Chan Zuckerberg Biohub, San Francisco, CA 94158, USA
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8
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Jeon W, Kim D. AbFlex: designing antibody complementarity determining regions with flexible CDR definition. Bioinformatics 2024; 40:btae122. [PMID: 38449295 DOI: 10.1093/bioinformatics/btae122] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Grants] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 09/29/2023] [Revised: 02/04/2024] [Accepted: 03/05/2024] [Indexed: 03/08/2024] Open
Abstract
MOTIVATION Antibodies are proteins that the immune system produces in response to foreign pathogens. Designing antibodies that specifically bind to antigens is a key step in developing antibody therapeutics. The complementarity determining regions (CDRs) of the antibody are mainly responsible for binding to the target antigen, and therefore must be designed to recognize the antigen. RESULTS We develop an antibody design model, AbFlex, that exhibits state-of-the-art performance in terms of structure prediction accuracy and amino acid recovery rate. Furthermore, >38% of newly designed antibody models are estimated to have better binding energies for their antigens than wild types. The effectiveness of the model is attributed to two different strategies that are developed to overcome the difficulty associated with the scarcity of antibody-antigen complex structure data. One strategy is to use an equivariant graph neural network model that is more data-efficient. More importantly, a new data augmentation strategy based on the flexible definition of CDRs significantly increases the performance of the CDR prediction model. AVAILABILITY AND IMPLEMENTATION The source code and implementation are available at https://github.com/wsjeon92/AbFlex.
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Affiliation(s)
- Woosung Jeon
- Department of Bio and Brain Engineering, Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, 291 Daehak-ro, Yuseong-gu, Daejeon 34141, Republic of Korea
| | - Dongsup Kim
- Department of Bio and Brain Engineering, Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, 291 Daehak-ro, Yuseong-gu, Daejeon 34141, Republic of Korea
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9
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Sulea T, Kumar S, Kuroda D. Editorial: Progress and challenges in computational structure-based design and development of biologic drugs. Front Mol Biosci 2024; 11:1360267. [PMID: 38389897 PMCID: PMC10883042 DOI: 10.3389/fmolb.2024.1360267] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Key Words] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 12/22/2023] [Accepted: 02/01/2024] [Indexed: 02/24/2024] Open
Affiliation(s)
- Traian Sulea
- Human Health Therapeutics Research Centre, National Research Council Canada, Montreal, QC, Canada
| | - Sandeep Kumar
- Computational Protein Design and Modeling, Computational Science, Moderna Therapeutics, Cambridge, MA, United States
| | - Daisuke Kuroda
- Research Center of Drug and Vaccine Development, National Institute of Infectious Diseases, Tokyo, Japan
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10
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Gallo E. Revolutionizing Synthetic Antibody Design: Harnessing Artificial Intelligence and Deep Sequencing Big Data for Unprecedented Advances. Mol Biotechnol 2024:10.1007/s12033-024-01064-2. [PMID: 38308755 DOI: 10.1007/s12033-024-01064-2] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Grants] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 11/03/2023] [Accepted: 01/02/2024] [Indexed: 02/05/2024]
Abstract
Synthetic antibodies (Abs) represent a category of engineered proteins meticulously crafted to replicate the functions of their natural counterparts. Such Abs are generated in vitro, enabling advanced molecular alterations associated with antigen recognition, paratope site engineering, and biochemical refinements. In a parallel realm, deep sequencing has brought about a paradigm shift in molecular biology. It facilitates the prompt and cost-effective high-throughput sequencing of DNA and RNA molecules, enabling the comprehensive big data analysis of Ab transcriptomes, including specific regions of interest. Significantly, the integration of artificial intelligence (AI), based on machine- and deep- learning approaches, has fundamentally transformed our capacity to discern patterns hidden within deep sequencing big data, including distinctive Ab features and protein folding free energy landscapes. Ultimately, current AI advances can generate approximations of the most stable Ab structural configurations, enabling the prediction of de novo synthetic Abs. As a result, this manuscript comprehensively examines the latest and relevant literature concerning the intersection of deep sequencing big data and AI methodologies for the design and development of synthetic Abs. Together, these advancements have accelerated the exploration of antibody repertoires, contributing to the refinement of synthetic Ab engineering and optimizations, and facilitating advancements in the lead identification process.
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Affiliation(s)
- Eugenio Gallo
- Avance Biologicals, Department of Medicinal Chemistry, 950 Dupont Street, Toronto, ON, M6H 1Z2, Canada.
- RevivAb, Department of Protein Engineering, Av. Ipiranga, 6681, Partenon, Porto Alegre, RS, 90619-900, Brazil.
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11
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Bravi B. Development and use of machine learning algorithms in vaccine target selection. NPJ Vaccines 2024; 9:15. [PMID: 38242890 PMCID: PMC10798987 DOI: 10.1038/s41541-023-00795-8] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 08/04/2023] [Accepted: 12/07/2023] [Indexed: 01/21/2024] Open
Abstract
Computer-aided discovery of vaccine targets has become a cornerstone of rational vaccine design. In this article, I discuss how Machine Learning (ML) can inform and guide key computational steps in rational vaccine design concerned with the identification of B and T cell epitopes and correlates of protection. I provide examples of ML models, as well as types of data and predictions for which they are built. I argue that interpretable ML has the potential to improve the identification of immunogens also as a tool for scientific discovery, by helping elucidate the molecular processes underlying vaccine-induced immune responses. I outline the limitations and challenges in terms of data availability and method development that need to be addressed to bridge the gap between advances in ML predictions and their translational application to vaccine design.
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Affiliation(s)
- Barbara Bravi
- Department of Mathematics, Imperial College London, London, SW7 2AZ, UK.
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12
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Su Z, Almo SC, Wu Y. Computational simulations of bispecific T cell engagers by a multiscale model. Biophys J 2024; 123:235-247. [PMID: 38102828 PMCID: PMC10808035 DOI: 10.1016/j.bpj.2023.12.012] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [MESH Headings] [Grants] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 06/08/2023] [Revised: 11/04/2023] [Accepted: 12/12/2023] [Indexed: 12/17/2023] Open
Abstract
The use of bispecific antibodies as T cell engagers can bypass the normal T cell receptor-major histocompatibility class interaction, redirect the cytotoxic activity of T cells, and lead to highly efficient tumor cell killing. However, this immunotherapy also causes significant on-target off-tumor toxicologic effects, especially when it is used to treat solid tumors. To avoid these adverse events, it is necessary to understand the fundamental mechanisms involved in the physical process of T cell engagement. We developed a multiscale computational framework to reach this goal. The framework combines simulations on the intercellular and multicellular levels. On the intercellular level, we simulated the spatial-temporal dynamics of three-body interactions among bispecific antibodies, CD3 and tumor-associated antigens (TAAs). The derived number of intercellular bonds formed between CD3 and TAAs was further transferred to the multicellular simulations as the input parameter of adhesive density between cells. Through the simulations under various molecular and cellular conditions, we were able to gain new insights into how to adopt the most appropriate strategy to maximize the drug efficacy and avoid the off-target effect. For instance, we discovered that the low antibody-binding affinity resulted in the formation of large clusters at the cell-cell interface, which could be important to control the downstream signaling pathways. We also tested different molecular architectures of the bispecific antibody and suggested the existence of an optimal length in regulating the T cell engagement. Overall, the current multiscale simulations serve as a proof-of-concept study to help in the future design of new biological therapeutics.
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Affiliation(s)
- Zhaoqian Su
- Data Science Institute, Vanderbilt University, Nashville, Tennessee
| | - Steven C Almo
- Department of Biochemistry, Albert Einstein College of Medicine, Bronx, New York; Department of Physiology and Biophysics, Albert Einstein College of Medicine, Bronx, New York
| | - Yinghao Wu
- Department of Systems and Computational Biology, Albert Einstein College of Medicine, Bronx, New York.
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13
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Brudar S, Breydo L, Chung E, Dill KA, Ehterami N, Phadnis K, Senapati S, Shameem M, Tang X, Tayyab M, Hribar-Lee B. Antibody association in solution: cluster distributions and mechanisms. MAbs 2024; 16:2339582. [PMID: 38666507 PMCID: PMC11057677 DOI: 10.1080/19420862.2024.2339582] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [MESH Headings] [Grants] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 12/07/2023] [Accepted: 04/02/2024] [Indexed: 05/01/2024] Open
Abstract
Understanding factors that affect the clustering and association of antibodies molecules in solution is critical to their development as therapeutics. For 19 different monoclonal antibody (mAb) solutions, we measured the viscosities, the second virial coefficients, the Kirkwood-Buff integrals, and the cluster distributions of the antibody molecules as functions of protein concentration. Solutions were modeled using the statistical-physics Wertheim liquid-solution theory, representing antibodies as Y-shaped molecular structures of seven beads each. We found that high-viscosity solutions result from more antibody molecules per cluster. Multi-body properties such as viscosity are well predicted experimentally by the 2-body Kirkwood-Buff quantity, G22, but not by the second virial coefficient, B22, and well-predicted theoretically from the Wertheim protein-protein sticking energy. Weakly interacting antibodies are rate-limited by nucleation; strongly interacting ones by propagation. This approach gives a way to relate micro to macro properties of solutions of associating proteins.
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Affiliation(s)
- Sandi Brudar
- Faculty of Chemistry and Chemical Technology, University of Ljubljana, Ljubljana, Slovenia
| | - Leonid Breydo
- Formulation Development Group, Regeneron Pharmaceuticals, Tarrytown, NY, USA
| | - Elisha Chung
- Formulation Development Group, Regeneron Pharmaceuticals, Tarrytown, NY, USA
| | - Ken A. Dill
- Laufer Center for Physical and Quantitative Biology, Stony Brook University, Stony Brook, NY, USA
- Department of Chemistry and Department of Physics and Astronomy, Stony Brook University, Stony Brook, NY, USA
| | - Nasim Ehterami
- Formulation Development Group, Regeneron Pharmaceuticals, Tarrytown, NY, USA
| | - Ketan Phadnis
- Formulation Development Group, Regeneron Pharmaceuticals, Tarrytown, NY, USA
| | - Samir Senapati
- Formulation Development Group, Regeneron Pharmaceuticals, Tarrytown, NY, USA
| | - Mohammed Shameem
- Formulation Development Group, Regeneron Pharmaceuticals, Tarrytown, NY, USA
| | - Xiaolin Tang
- Formulation Development Group, Regeneron Pharmaceuticals, Tarrytown, NY, USA
| | - Muhammmad Tayyab
- Formulation Development Group, Regeneron Pharmaceuticals, Tarrytown, NY, USA
| | - Barbara Hribar-Lee
- Faculty of Chemistry and Chemical Technology, University of Ljubljana, Ljubljana, Slovenia
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14
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Baronaite U, Cachat E. Preparation of Chromobodies for the Detection of Cell Surface Epitopes. Methods Mol Biol 2024; 2774:303-314. [PMID: 38441773 DOI: 10.1007/978-1-0716-3718-0_20] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [MESH Headings] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Indexed: 03/07/2024]
Abstract
Chromobodies are nanobodies genetically fused to fluorescent proteins, which were developed to visualize endogenous intracellular antigens. These versatile bioimaging nanotools can also be used to detect cell surface epitopes, and we describe here how we use them as an alternative to conjugated antibodies. This way, we routinely test the binding efficiency of nanobodies for their cognate cell surface antigens, before integrating them as sensing domains into complex synthetic receptor architectures.
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Affiliation(s)
- Ugne Baronaite
- Centre for Engineering Biology, School of Biological Sciences, The University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, United Kingdom
- Institute for Quantitative Biology, Biochemistry and Biotechnology, School of Biological Sciences, The University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, United Kingdom
| | - Elise Cachat
- Centre for Engineering Biology, School of Biological Sciences, The University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, United Kingdom.
- Institute for Quantitative Biology, Biochemistry and Biotechnology, School of Biological Sciences, The University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, United Kingdom.
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15
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Dudzic P, Chomicz D, Kończak J, Satława T, Janusz B, Wrobel S, Gawłowski T, Jaszczyszyn I, Bielska W, Demharter S, Spreafico R, Schulte L, Martin K, Comeau SR, Krawczyk K. Large-scale data mining of four billion human antibody variable regions reveals convergence between therapeutic and natural antibodies that constrains search space for biologics drug discovery. MAbs 2024; 16:2361928. [PMID: 38844871 PMCID: PMC11164219 DOI: 10.1080/19420862.2024.2361928] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [MESH Headings] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 01/30/2024] [Accepted: 05/27/2024] [Indexed: 06/12/2024] Open
Abstract
The naïve human antibody repertoire has theoretical access to an estimated > 1015 antibodies. Identifying subsets of this prohibitively large space where therapeutically relevant antibodies may be found is useful for development of these agents. It was previously demonstrated that, despite the immense sequence space, different individuals can produce the same antibodies. It was also shown that therapeutic antibodies, which typically follow seemingly unnatural development processes, can arise independently naturally. To check for biases in how the sequence space is explored, we data mined public repositories to identify 220 bioprojects with a combined seven billion reads. Of these, we created a subset of human bioprojects that we make available as the AbNGS database (https://naturalantibody.com/ngs/). AbNGS contains 135 bioprojects with four billion productive human heavy variable region sequences and 385 million unique complementarity-determining region (CDR)-H3s. We find that 270,000 (0.07% of 385 million) unique CDR-H3s are highly public in that they occur in at least five of 135 bioprojects. Of 700 unique therapeutic CDR-H3, a total of 6% has direct matches in the small set of 270,000. This observation extends to a match between CDR-H3 and V-gene call as well. Thus, the subspace of shared ('public') CDR-H3s shows utility for serving as a starting point for therapeutic antibody design.
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Affiliation(s)
| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | - Lukas Schulte
- Global Computational Biology & Digital Sciences, Boehringer Ingelheim Pharma GmbH & Co. KG, Biberach an der Riß, Germany
| | - Kyle Martin
- Biotherapeutics Discovery, Boehringer Ingelheim, Ridgefield, CT, USA
| | - Stephen R. Comeau
- Biotherapeutics Discovery, Boehringer Ingelheim, Ridgefield, CT, USA
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16
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Olechnovič K, Valančauskas L, Dapkūnas J, Venclovas Č. Prediction of protein assemblies by structure sampling followed by interface-focused scoring. Proteins 2023; 91:1724-1733. [PMID: 37578163 DOI: 10.1002/prot.26569] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [MESH Headings] [Grants] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 03/08/2023] [Revised: 07/12/2023] [Accepted: 07/31/2023] [Indexed: 08/15/2023]
Abstract
Proteins often function as part of permanent or transient multimeric complexes, and understanding function of these assemblies requires knowledge of their three-dimensional structures. While the ability of AlphaFold to predict structures of individual proteins with unprecedented accuracy has revolutionized structural biology, modeling structures of protein assemblies remains challenging. To address this challenge, we developed a protocol for predicting structures of protein complexes involving model sampling followed by scoring focused on the subunit-subunit interaction interface. In this protocol, we diversified AlphaFold models by varying construction and pairing of multiple sequence alignments as well as increasing the number of recycles. In cases when AlphaFold failed to assemble a full protein complex or produced unreliable results, additional diverse models were constructed by docking of monomers or subcomplexes. All the models were then scored using a newly developed method, VoroIF-jury, which relies only on structural information. Notably, VoroIF-jury is independent of AlphaFold self-assessment scores and therefore can be used to rank models originating from different structure prediction methods. We tested our protocol in CASP15 and obtained top results, significantly outperforming the standard AlphaFold-Multimer pipeline. Analysis of our results showed that the accuracy of our assembly models was capped mainly by structure sampling rather than model scoring. This observation suggests that better sampling, especially for the antibody-antigen complexes, may lead to further improvement. Our protocol is expected to be useful for modeling and/or scoring protein assemblies.
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Affiliation(s)
- Kliment Olechnovič
- Institute of Biotechnology, Life Sciences Center, Vilnius University, Vilnius, Lithuania
| | - Lukas Valančauskas
- Institute of Biotechnology, Life Sciences Center, Vilnius University, Vilnius, Lithuania
| | - Justas Dapkūnas
- Institute of Biotechnology, Life Sciences Center, Vilnius University, Vilnius, Lithuania
| | - Česlovas Venclovas
- Institute of Biotechnology, Life Sciences Center, Vilnius University, Vilnius, Lithuania
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17
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Mariottini D, Bracaglia S, Barbero L, Fuchs SW, Saal C, Moniot S, Knuehl C, Baranda L, Ranallo S, Ricci F. Bispecific Antibody Detection Using Antigen-Conjugated Synthetic Nucleic Acid Strands. ACS Sens 2023; 8:4014-4019. [PMID: 37856082 PMCID: PMC10683503 DOI: 10.1021/acssensors.3c01717] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [MESH Headings] [Grants] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 08/18/2023] [Accepted: 10/13/2023] [Indexed: 10/20/2023]
Abstract
We report here the development of two different sensing strategies based on the use of antigen-conjugated nucleic acid strands for the detection of a bispecific antibody against the tumor-related proteins Mucin1 and epidermal growth factor receptor. Both approaches work well in serum samples (nanomolar sensitivity), show high specificity against the two monospecific antibodies, and are rapid. The results presented here demonstrate the versatility of DNA-based platforms for the detection of bispecific antibodies and could represent a versatile alternative to other more reagent-intensive and time-consuming analytical approaches.
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Affiliation(s)
- Davide Mariottini
- Department
of Chemical Science and Technologies, University
of Rome Tor Vergata, Via della Ricerca Scientifica 1, 00133 Rome, Italy
| | - Sara Bracaglia
- Department
of Chemical Science and Technologies, University
of Rome Tor Vergata, Via della Ricerca Scientifica 1, 00133 Rome, Italy
| | - Luca Barbero
- RBM-Merck
(an affiliate of Merck KGaA), Via Ribes 1, 10010 Turin, Italy
| | | | - Christoph Saal
- Merck
KGaA, Frankfurter Strasse 250, 64293 Darmstadt, Germany
| | | | | | - Lorena Baranda
- Department
of Chemical Science and Technologies, University
of Rome Tor Vergata, Via della Ricerca Scientifica 1, 00133 Rome, Italy
| | - Simona Ranallo
- Department
of Chemical Science and Technologies, University
of Rome Tor Vergata, Via della Ricerca Scientifica 1, 00133 Rome, Italy
| | - Francesco Ricci
- Department
of Chemical Science and Technologies, University
of Rome Tor Vergata, Via della Ricerca Scientifica 1, 00133 Rome, Italy
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18
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Polonsky K, Pupko T, Freund NT. Evaluation of the Ability of AlphaFold to Predict the Three-Dimensional Structures of Antibodies and Epitopes. JOURNAL OF IMMUNOLOGY (BALTIMORE, MD. : 1950) 2023; 211:1578-1588. [PMID: 37782047 DOI: 10.4049/jimmunol.2300150] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [MESH Headings] [Track Full Text] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 03/03/2023] [Accepted: 09/06/2023] [Indexed: 10/03/2023]
Abstract
Being able to accurately predict the three-dimensional structure of an Ab can facilitate Ab characterization and epitope prediction, with important diagnostic and clinical implications. In this study, we evaluated the ability of AlphaFold to predict the structures of 222 recently published, high-resolution Fab H and L chain structures of Abs from different species directed against different Ags. We show that although the overall Ab prediction quality is in line with the results of CASP14, regions such as the complementarity-determining regions (CDRs) of the H chain, which are prone to higher variation, are predicted less accurately. Moreover, we discovered that AlphaFold mispredicts the bending angles between the variable and constant domains. To evaluate the ability of AlphaFold to model Ab-Ag interactions based only on sequence, we used AlphaFold-Multimer in combination with ZDOCK to predict the structures of 26 known Ab-Ag complexes. ZDOCK, which was applied on bound components of both the Ab and the Ag, succeeded in assembling 11 complexes, whereas AlphaFold succeeded in predicting only 2 of 26 models, with significant deviations in the docking contacts predicted in the rest of the molecules. Within the 11 complexes that were successfully predicted by ZDOCK, 9 involved short-peptide Ags (18-mer or less), whereas only 2 were complexes of Ab with a full-length protein. Docking of modeled unbound Ab and Ag was unsuccessful. In summary, our study provides important information about the abilities and limitations of using AlphaFold to predict Ab-Ag interactions and suggests areas for possible improvement.
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Affiliation(s)
- Ksenia Polonsky
- Department of Clinical Microbiology and Immunology, Faculty of Medicine, Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv, Israel
- Shmunis School of Biomedicine and Cancer Research, George S. Wise Faculty of Life Sciences, Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv, Israel
| | - Tal Pupko
- Shmunis School of Biomedicine and Cancer Research, George S. Wise Faculty of Life Sciences, Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv, Israel
| | - Natalia T Freund
- Department of Clinical Microbiology and Immunology, Faculty of Medicine, Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv, Israel
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19
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Fernández-Quintero ML, Pomarici ND, Fischer ALM, Hoerschinger VJ, Kroell KB, Riccabona JR, Kamenik AS, Loeffler JR, Ferguson JA, Perrett HR, Liedl KR, Han J, Ward AB. Structure and Dynamics Guiding Design of Antibody Therapeutics and Vaccines. Antibodies (Basel) 2023; 12:67. [PMID: 37873864 PMCID: PMC10594513 DOI: 10.3390/antib12040067] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Grants] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 09/05/2023] [Revised: 10/10/2023] [Accepted: 10/13/2023] [Indexed: 10/25/2023] Open
Abstract
Antibodies and other new antibody-like formats have emerged as one of the most rapidly growing classes of biotherapeutic proteins. Understanding the structural features that drive antibody function and, consequently, their molecular recognition is critical for engineering antibodies. Here, we present the structural architecture of conventional IgG antibodies alongside other formats. We emphasize the importance of considering antibodies as conformational ensembles in solution instead of focusing on single-static structures because their functions and properties are strongly governed by their dynamic nature. Thus, in this review, we provide an overview of the unique structural and dynamic characteristics of antibodies with respect to their antigen recognition, biophysical properties, and effector functions. We highlight the numerous technical advances in antibody structure prediction and design, enabled by the vast number of experimentally determined high-quality structures recorded with cryo-EM, NMR, and X-ray crystallography. Lastly, we assess antibody and vaccine design strategies in the context of structure and dynamics.
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Affiliation(s)
- Monica L. Fernández-Quintero
- Institute of General, Inorganic and Theoretical Chemistry, University of Innsbruck, Innrain 80/82, A-6020 Innsbruck, Austria
- Department of Integrative Structural and Computational Biology, The Scripps Research Institute, La Jolla, CA 92037, USA
| | - Nancy D. Pomarici
- Institute of General, Inorganic and Theoretical Chemistry, University of Innsbruck, Innrain 80/82, A-6020 Innsbruck, Austria
| | - Anna-Lena M. Fischer
- Institute of General, Inorganic and Theoretical Chemistry, University of Innsbruck, Innrain 80/82, A-6020 Innsbruck, Austria
| | - Valentin J. Hoerschinger
- Institute of General, Inorganic and Theoretical Chemistry, University of Innsbruck, Innrain 80/82, A-6020 Innsbruck, Austria
| | - Katharina B. Kroell
- Institute of General, Inorganic and Theoretical Chemistry, University of Innsbruck, Innrain 80/82, A-6020 Innsbruck, Austria
| | - Jakob R. Riccabona
- Institute of General, Inorganic and Theoretical Chemistry, University of Innsbruck, Innrain 80/82, A-6020 Innsbruck, Austria
| | - Anna S. Kamenik
- Institute of General, Inorganic and Theoretical Chemistry, University of Innsbruck, Innrain 80/82, A-6020 Innsbruck, Austria
| | - Johannes R. Loeffler
- Institute of General, Inorganic and Theoretical Chemistry, University of Innsbruck, Innrain 80/82, A-6020 Innsbruck, Austria
- Department of Integrative Structural and Computational Biology, The Scripps Research Institute, La Jolla, CA 92037, USA
| | - James A. Ferguson
- Department of Integrative Structural and Computational Biology, The Scripps Research Institute, La Jolla, CA 92037, USA
| | - Hailee R. Perrett
- Department of Integrative Structural and Computational Biology, The Scripps Research Institute, La Jolla, CA 92037, USA
| | - Klaus R. Liedl
- Institute of General, Inorganic and Theoretical Chemistry, University of Innsbruck, Innrain 80/82, A-6020 Innsbruck, Austria
| | - Julianna Han
- Department of Integrative Structural and Computational Biology, The Scripps Research Institute, La Jolla, CA 92037, USA
| | - Andrew B. Ward
- Department of Integrative Structural and Computational Biology, The Scripps Research Institute, La Jolla, CA 92037, USA
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20
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Zhou Y, Huang Z, Li W, Wei J, Jiang Q, Yang W, Huang J. Deep learning in preclinical antibody drug discovery and development. Methods 2023; 218:57-71. [PMID: 37454742 DOI: 10.1016/j.ymeth.2023.07.003] [Citation(s) in RCA: 1] [Impact Index Per Article: 1.0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [MESH Headings] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 11/22/2022] [Revised: 03/20/2023] [Accepted: 07/10/2023] [Indexed: 07/18/2023] Open
Abstract
Antibody drugs have become a key part of biotherapeutics. Patients suffering from various diseases have benefited from antibody therapies. However, its development process is rather long, expensive and risky. To speed up the process, reduce cost and improve success rate, artificial intelligence, especially deep learning methods, have been widely used in all aspects of preclinical antibody drug development, from library generation to hit identification, developability screening, lead selection and optimization. In this review, we systematically summarize antibody encodings, deep learning architectures and models used in preclinical antibody drug discovery and development. We also critically discuss challenges and opportunities, problems and possible solutions, current applications and future directions of deep learning in antibody drug development.
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Affiliation(s)
- Yuwei Zhou
- School of Life Science and Technology, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Chengdu 611731, China
| | - Ziru Huang
- School of Life Science and Technology, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Chengdu 611731, China
| | - Wenzhen Li
- School of Life Science and Technology, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Chengdu 611731, China
| | - Jinyi Wei
- School of Life Science and Technology, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Chengdu 611731, China
| | - Qianhu Jiang
- School of Life Science and Technology, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Chengdu 611731, China
| | - Wei Yang
- School of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Chengdu 611731, China
| | - Jian Huang
- School of Life Science and Technology, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Chengdu 611731, China.
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21
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Xu X, Xu T, Zhou J, Liao X, Zhang R, Wang Y, Zhang L, Gao X. AB-Gen: Antibody Library Design with Generative Pre-trained Transformer and Deep Reinforcement Learning. GENOMICS, PROTEOMICS & BIOINFORMATICS 2023; 21:1043-1053. [PMID: 37364719 PMCID: PMC10928431 DOI: 10.1016/j.gpb.2023.03.004] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [MESH Headings] [Track Full Text] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 02/20/2023] [Revised: 03/18/2023] [Accepted: 03/30/2023] [Indexed: 06/28/2023]
Abstract
Antibody leads must fulfill multiple desirable properties to be clinical candidates. Primarily due to the low throughput in the experimental procedure, the need for such multi-property optimization causes the bottleneck in preclinical antibody discovery and development, because addressing one issue usually causes another. We developed a reinforcement learning (RL) method, named AB-Gen, for antibody library design using a generative pre-trained transformer (GPT) as the policy network of the RL agent. We showed that this model can learn the antibody space of heavy chain complementarity determining region 3 (CDRH3) and generate sequences with similar property distributions. Besides, when using human epidermal growth factor receptor-2 (HER2) as the target, the agent model of AB-Gen was able to generate novel CDRH3 sequences that fulfill multi-property constraints. Totally, 509 generated sequences were able to pass all property filters, and three highly conserved residues were identified. The importance of these residues was further demonstrated by molecular dynamics simulations, consolidating that the agent model was capable of grasping important information in this complex optimization task. Overall, the AB-Gen method is able to design novel antibody sequences with an improved success rate than the traditional propose-then-filter approach. It has the potential to be used in practical antibody design, thus empowering the antibody discovery and development process. The source code of AB-Gen is freely available at Zenodo (https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7657016) and BioCode (https://ngdc.cncb.ac.cn/biocode/tools/BT007341).
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Affiliation(s)
- Xiaopeng Xu
- Computational Bioscience Research Center (CBRC), King Abdullah University of Science and Technology, Thuwal 23955-6900, Saudi Arabia
| | - Tiantian Xu
- State Key Laboratory of Structural Chemistry, Fujian Institute of Research on the Structure of Matter, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Fuzhou 350002, China; University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100049, China
| | - Juexiao Zhou
- Computational Bioscience Research Center (CBRC), King Abdullah University of Science and Technology, Thuwal 23955-6900, Saudi Arabia
| | - Xingyu Liao
- Computational Bioscience Research Center (CBRC), King Abdullah University of Science and Technology, Thuwal 23955-6900, Saudi Arabia
| | | | - Yu Wang
- Syneron Technology, Guangzhou 510000, China
| | - Lu Zhang
- State Key Laboratory of Structural Chemistry, Fujian Institute of Research on the Structure of Matter, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Fuzhou 350002, China; University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100049, China; Fujian Provincial Key Laboratory of Theoretical and Computational Chemistry, Fuzhou 361005, China
| | - Xin Gao
- Computational Bioscience Research Center (CBRC), King Abdullah University of Science and Technology, Thuwal 23955-6900, Saudi Arabia.
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22
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Ejaz S, Paracha RZ, Ejaz S, Jamal Z. Antibody designing against IIIabc junction (JIIIabc) of HCV IRES through affinity maturation; RNA-Antibody docking and interaction analysis. PLoS One 2023; 18:e0291213. [PMID: 37682810 PMCID: PMC10490861 DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0291213] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [MESH Headings] [Grants] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 04/25/2023] [Accepted: 08/24/2023] [Indexed: 09/10/2023] Open
Abstract
Hepatitis C virus is a single-stranded RNA based virus which can cause chronic HCV and hepatocellular carcinoma. HCV genotype 3a has relatively higher rate of fibrosis progression, prevalence of steatosis and incidence of HCC. Despite HCVs variation in genomic sequence, the 5' untranslated region containing internal ribosome entry site (IRES) is highly conserved among all genotypes. It is responsible for translation and initiation of the viral protein. In present study, IRES was targeted by designing variants of reported antigen binding fragment (Fab) through affinity maturation approach. Affinity maturation strategy allowed the rational antibody designing with better biophysical properties and antibody-antigen binding interactions. Complementarity determining regions of reported Fab (wild type) were assessed and docked with IRES. Best generated model of Fab was selected and subjected to alanine scanning Three sets of insilico mutations for variants (V) designing were selected; single (1-71), double (a-j) and triple (I-X). Redocking of IRES-Fab variants consequently enabled the discovery of three variants exhibiting better docking score as compared to the wild type Fab. V1, V39 and V4 exhibited docking scores of -446.51, -446.52 and-446.29 kcal/mol respectively which is better as compared to the wild type Fab that exhibited the docking score of -351.23 kcal/mol. Variants exhibiting better docking score were screened for aggregation propensity by assessing the aggregation prone regions in Fab structure. Total A3D scores of wild type Fab, V1, V4 and V39 were predicted as -315.325, -312.727, -316.967 and -317.545 respectively. It is manifested that solubility of V4 and V39 is comparable to wild type Fab. In future, development and invitro assessment of these promising Fab HCV3 variants is aimed.
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Affiliation(s)
- Saima Ejaz
- School of Interdisciplinary Engineering & Sciences (SINES), National University of Sciences and Technology, Islamabad, Pakistan
| | - Rehan Zafar Paracha
- School of Interdisciplinary Engineering & Sciences (SINES), National University of Sciences and Technology, Islamabad, Pakistan
| | - Sadaf Ejaz
- Department of Biosciences, COMSATS University Islamabad, Pakistan
| | - Zunera Jamal
- Department of Virology, National Institutes of Health, Islamabad, Pakistan
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23
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Hoffstedt M, Stein MO, Baumann K, Wätzig H. Experimentally Observed Conformational Changes in Antibodies Due to Binding and Paratope-epitope Asymmetries. J Pharm Sci 2023; 112:2404-2411. [PMID: 37295605 DOI: 10.1016/j.xphs.2023.06.003] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [MESH Headings] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 03/25/2023] [Revised: 06/02/2023] [Accepted: 06/02/2023] [Indexed: 06/12/2023]
Abstract
Understanding binding related changes in antibody conformations is important for epitope prediction and antibody refinement. The increase of available data in the PDB allowed a more detailed investigation of the conformational landscape for free and bound antibodies. A dataset containing a total of 835 unique PDB entries of antibodies that were crystallized in complex with their antigen and in a free state was constructed. It was examined for binding related conformation changes. We present further evidence supporting the theory of a pre-existing-equilibrium in experimental data. Multiple sequence alignments did not show binding induced tendencies in the solvent accessibility of residues in any specific position. Evaluating the changes in solvent accessibility per residue revealed a certain binding induced increase for several amino acids. Antibody-antigen interaction statistics were established and quantify a significant directional asymmetry between many interacting antibody and antigen residue pairs, especially a richness in tyrosine in the antibody epitope compared to its paratope. This asymmetry could potentially facilitate an increase in the success rate of computationally guided antibody refinement.
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Affiliation(s)
- Marc Hoffstedt
- Institute of Medicinal and Pharmaceutical Chemistry, TU Braunschweig, Braunschweig, Deutschland
| | - Matthias Oliver Stein
- Institute of Medicinal and Pharmaceutical Chemistry, TU Braunschweig, Braunschweig, Deutschland
| | - Knut Baumann
- Institute of Medicinal and Pharmaceutical Chemistry, TU Braunschweig, Braunschweig, Deutschland
| | - Hermann Wätzig
- Institute of Medicinal and Pharmaceutical Chemistry, TU Braunschweig, Braunschweig, Deutschland
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24
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Guarra F, Colombo G. Computational Methods in Immunology and Vaccinology: Design and Development of Antibodies and Immunogens. J Chem Theory Comput 2023; 19:5315-5333. [PMID: 37527403 PMCID: PMC10448727 DOI: 10.1021/acs.jctc.3c00513] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [MESH Headings] [Grants] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 05/17/2023] [Indexed: 08/03/2023]
Abstract
The design of new biomolecules able to harness immune mechanisms for the treatment of diseases is a prime challenge for computational and simulative approaches. For instance, in recent years, antibodies have emerged as an important class of therapeutics against a spectrum of pathologies. In cancer, immune-inspired approaches are witnessing a surge thanks to a better understanding of tumor-associated antigens and the mechanisms of their engagement or evasion from the human immune system. Here, we provide a summary of the main state-of-the-art computational approaches that are used to design antibodies and antigens, and in parallel, we review key methodologies for epitope identification for both B- and T-cell mediated responses. A special focus is devoted to the description of structure- and physics-based models, privileged over purely sequence-based approaches. We discuss the implications of novel methods in engineering biomolecules with tailored immunological properties for possible therapeutic uses. Finally, we highlight the extraordinary challenges and opportunities presented by the possible integration of structure- and physics-based methods with emerging Artificial Intelligence technologies for the prediction and design of novel antigens, epitopes, and antibodies.
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Affiliation(s)
- Federica Guarra
- Department of Chemistry, University
of Pavia, Via Taramelli 12, 27100 Pavia, Italy
| | - Giorgio Colombo
- Department of Chemistry, University
of Pavia, Via Taramelli 12, 27100 Pavia, Italy
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25
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Bauer J, Rajagopal N, Gupta P, Gupta P, Nixon AE, Kumar S. How can we discover developable antibody-based biotherapeutics? Front Mol Biosci 2023; 10:1221626. [PMID: 37609373 PMCID: PMC10441133 DOI: 10.3389/fmolb.2023.1221626] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Grants] [Track Full Text] [Figures] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 05/12/2023] [Accepted: 07/10/2023] [Indexed: 08/24/2023] Open
Abstract
Antibody-based biotherapeutics have emerged as a successful class of pharmaceuticals despite significant challenges and risks to their discovery and development. This review discusses the most frequently encountered hurdles in the research and development (R&D) of antibody-based biotherapeutics and proposes a conceptual framework called biopharmaceutical informatics. Our vision advocates for the syncretic use of computation and experimentation at every stage of biologic drug discovery, considering developability (manufacturability, safety, efficacy, and pharmacology) of potential drug candidates from the earliest stages of the drug discovery phase. The computational advances in recent years allow for more precise formulation of disease concepts, rapid identification, and validation of targets suitable for therapeutic intervention and discovery of potential biotherapeutics that can agonize or antagonize them. Furthermore, computational methods for de novo and epitope-specific antibody design are increasingly being developed, opening novel computationally driven opportunities for biologic drug discovery. Here, we review the opportunities and limitations of emerging computational approaches for optimizing antigens to generate robust immune responses, in silico generation of antibody sequences, discovery of potential antibody binders through virtual screening, assessment of hits, identification of lead drug candidates and their affinity maturation, and optimization for developability. The adoption of biopharmaceutical informatics across all aspects of drug discovery and development cycles should help bring affordable and effective biotherapeutics to patients more quickly.
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Affiliation(s)
- Joschka Bauer
- Early Stage Pharmaceutical Development Biologicals, Boehringer Ingelheim Pharma GmbH & Co. KG, Biberach/Riss, Germany
- In Silico Team, Boehringer Ingelheim, Hannover, Germany
| | - Nandhini Rajagopal
- In Silico Team, Boehringer Ingelheim, Hannover, Germany
- Biotherapeutics Discovery, Boehringer Ingelheim Pharmaceuticals Inc., Ridgefield, CT, United States
| | - Priyanka Gupta
- In Silico Team, Boehringer Ingelheim, Hannover, Germany
- Biotherapeutics Discovery, Boehringer Ingelheim Pharmaceuticals Inc., Ridgefield, CT, United States
| | - Pankaj Gupta
- In Silico Team, Boehringer Ingelheim, Hannover, Germany
- Biotherapeutics Discovery, Boehringer Ingelheim Pharmaceuticals Inc., Ridgefield, CT, United States
| | - Andrew E. Nixon
- Biotherapeutics Discovery, Boehringer Ingelheim Pharmaceuticals Inc., Ridgefield, CT, United States
| | - Sandeep Kumar
- In Silico Team, Boehringer Ingelheim, Hannover, Germany
- Biotherapeutics Discovery, Boehringer Ingelheim Pharmaceuticals Inc., Ridgefield, CT, United States
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26
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Yang X, Duan H, Liu X, Zhang X, Pan S, Zhang F, Gao P, Liu B, Yang J, Chi X, Yang W. Broad Sarbecovirus Neutralizing Antibodies Obtained by Computational Design and Synthetic Library Screening. J Virol 2023:e0061023. [PMID: 37367229 PMCID: PMC10373554 DOI: 10.1128/jvi.00610-23] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 04/27/2023] [Accepted: 06/10/2023] [Indexed: 06/28/2023] Open
Abstract
Members of the Sarbecovirus subgenus of Coronaviridae have twice caused deadly threats to humans. There is increasing concern about the rapid mutation of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), which has evolved into multiple generations of epidemic variants in 3 years. Broad neutralizing antibodies are of great importance for pandemic preparedness against SARS-CoV-2 variants and divergent zoonotic sarbecoviruses. Here, we analyzed the structural conservation of the receptor-binding domain (RBD) from representative sarbecoviruses and chose S2H97, a previously reported RBD antibody with ideal breadth and resistance to escape, as a template for computational design to enhance the neutralization activity and spectrum. A total of 35 designs were purified for evaluation. The neutralizing activity of a large proportion of these designs against multiple variants was increased from several to hundreds of times. Molecular dynamics simulation suggested that extra interface contacts and enhanced intermolecular interactions between the RBD and the designed antibodies are established. After light and heavy chain reconstitution, AI-1028, with five complementarity determining regions optimized, showed the best neutralizing activity across all tested sarbecoviruses, including SARS-CoV, multiple SARS-CoV-2 variants, and bat-derived viruses. AI-1028 recognized the same cryptic RBD epitope as the parental prototype antibody. In addition to computational design, chemically synthesized nanobody libraries are also a precious resource for rapid antibody development. By applying distinct RBDs as baits for reciprocal screening, we identified two novel nanobodies with broad activities. These findings provide potential pan-sarbecovirus neutralizing drugs and highlight new pathways to rapidly optimize therapeutic candidates when novel SARS-CoV-2 escape variants or new zoonotic coronaviruses emerge. IMPORTANCE The subgenus Sarbecovirus includes human SARS-CoV, SARS-CoV-2, and hundreds of genetically related bat viruses. The continuous evolution of SARS-CoV-2 has led to the striking evasion of neutralizing antibody (NAb) drugs and convalescent plasma. Antibodies with broad activity across sarbecoviruses would be helpful to combat current SARS-CoV-2 mutations and longer term animal virus spillovers. The study of pan-sarbecovirus NAbs described here is significant for the following reasons. First, we established a structure-based computational pipeline to design and optimize NAbs to obtain more potent and broader neutralizing activity across multiple sarbecoviruses. Second, we screened and identified nanobodies from a highly diversified synthetic library with a broad neutralizing spectrum using an elaborate screening strategy. These methodologies provide guidance for the rapid development of antibody therapeutics against emerging pathogens with highly variable characteristics.
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Affiliation(s)
- Xuehua Yang
- NHC Key Laboratory of Systems Biology of Pathogens, Institute of Pathogen Biology, Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences & Peking Union Medical College, Beijing, China
| | - Huarui Duan
- NHC Key Laboratory of Systems Biology of Pathogens, Institute of Pathogen Biology, Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences & Peking Union Medical College, Beijing, China
| | - Xiuying Liu
- NHC Key Laboratory of Systems Biology of Pathogens, Institute of Pathogen Biology, Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences & Peking Union Medical College, Beijing, China
| | - Xinhui Zhang
- NHC Key Laboratory of Systems Biology of Pathogens, Institute of Pathogen Biology, Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences & Peking Union Medical College, Beijing, China
| | - Shengnan Pan
- NHC Key Laboratory of Systems Biology of Pathogens, Institute of Pathogen Biology, Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences & Peking Union Medical College, Beijing, China
| | - Fangyuan Zhang
- NHC Key Laboratory of Systems Biology of Pathogens, Institute of Pathogen Biology, Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences & Peking Union Medical College, Beijing, China
| | - Peixiang Gao
- NHC Key Laboratory of Systems Biology of Pathogens, Institute of Pathogen Biology, Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences & Peking Union Medical College, Beijing, China
| | - Bo Liu
- NHC Key Laboratory of Systems Biology of Pathogens, Institute of Pathogen Biology, Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences & Peking Union Medical College, Beijing, China
| | - Jian Yang
- NHC Key Laboratory of Systems Biology of Pathogens, Institute of Pathogen Biology, Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences & Peking Union Medical College, Beijing, China
| | - Xiaojing Chi
- NHC Key Laboratory of Systems Biology of Pathogens, Institute of Pathogen Biology, Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences & Peking Union Medical College, Beijing, China
| | - Wei Yang
- NHC Key Laboratory of Systems Biology of Pathogens, Institute of Pathogen Biology, Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences & Peking Union Medical College, Beijing, China
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Su Z, Almo SC, Wu Y. Understanding the General Principles of T Cell Engagement by Multiscale Computational Simulations. BIORXIV : THE PREPRINT SERVER FOR BIOLOGY 2023:2023.06.07.544116. [PMID: 37333150 PMCID: PMC10274768 DOI: 10.1101/2023.06.07.544116] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Track Full Text] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Indexed: 06/20/2023]
Abstract
The use of bispecific antibodies as T cell engagers can bypass the normal TCR-MHC interaction, redirect the cytotoxic activity of T-cells, and lead to highly efficient tumor cell killing. However, this immunotherapy also causes significant on-target off-tumor toxicologic effects, especially when they were used to treat solid tumors. In order to avoid these adverse events, it is necessary to understand the fundamental mechanisms during the physical process of T cell engagement. We developed a multiscale computational framework to reach this goal. The framework combines simulations on the intercellular and multicellular levels. On the intercellular level, we simulated the spatial-temporal dynamics of three-body interactions among bispecific antibodies, CD3 and TAA. The derived number of intercellular bonds formed between CD3 and TAA were further transferred into the multicellular simulations as the input parameter of adhesive density between cells. Through the simulations under various molecular and cellular conditions, we were able to gain new insights of how to adopt the most appropriate strategy to maximize the drug efficacy and avoid the off-target effect. For instance, we discovered that the low antibody binding affinity resulted in the formation of large clusters at the cell-cell interface, which could be important to control the downstream signaling pathways. We also tested different molecular architectures of the bispecific antibody and suggested the existence of an optimal length in regulating the T cell engagement. Overall, the current multiscale simulations serve as a prove-of-concept study to help the future design of new biological therapeutics. SIGNIFICANCE T-cell engagers are a class of anti-cancer drugs that can directly kill tumor cells by bringing T cells next to them. However, current treatments using T-cell engagers can cause serious side-effects. In order to reduce these effects, it is necessary to understand how T cells and tumor cells interact together through the connection of T-cell engagers. Unfortunately, this process is not well studied due to the limitations in current experimental techniques. We developed computational models on two different scales to simulate the physical process of T cell engagement. Our simulation results provide new insights into the general properties of T cell engagers. The new simulation methods can therefore serve as a useful tool to design novel antibodies for cancer immunotherapy.
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Sheng Z, Bimela JS, Wang M, Li Z, Guo Y, Ho DD. An optimized thermodynamics integration protocol for identifying beneficial mutations in antibody design. Front Immunol 2023; 14:1190416. [PMID: 37275896 PMCID: PMC10235760 DOI: 10.3389/fimmu.2023.1190416] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [MESH Headings] [Grants] [Track Full Text] [Figures] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 03/20/2023] [Accepted: 04/28/2023] [Indexed: 06/07/2023] Open
Abstract
Accurate identification of beneficial mutations is central to antibody design. Many knowledge-based (KB) computational approaches have been developed to predict beneficial mutations, but their accuracy leaves room for improvement. Thermodynamic integration (TI) is an alchemical free energy algorithm that offers an alternative technique for identifying beneficial mutations, but its performance has not been evaluated. In this study, we developed an efficient TI protocol with high accuracy for predicting binding free energy changes of antibody mutations. The improved TI method outperforms KB methods at identifying both beneficial and deleterious mutations. We observed that KB methods have higher accuracies in predicting deleterious mutations than beneficial mutations. A pipeline using KB methods to efficiently exclude deleterious mutations and TI to accurately identify beneficial mutations was developed for high-throughput mutation scanning. The pipeline was applied to optimize the binding affinity of a broadly sarbecovirus neutralizing antibody 10-40 against the circulating severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) omicron variant. Three identified beneficial mutations show strong synergy and improve both binding affinity and neutralization potency of antibody 10-40. Molecular dynamics simulation revealed that the three mutations improve the binding affinity of antibody 10-40 through the stabilization of an altered binding mode with increased polar and hydrophobic interactions. Above all, this study presents an accurate and efficient TI-based approach for optimizing antibodies and other biomolecules.
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Affiliation(s)
- Zizhang Sheng
- Aaron Diamond AIDS Research Center, Columbia University Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons, New York, NY, United States
| | - Jude S. Bimela
- Zuckerman Mind Brain Behavior Institute, Columbia University, New York, NY, United States
| | - Maple Wang
- Aaron Diamond AIDS Research Center, Columbia University Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons, New York, NY, United States
| | - Zhiteng Li
- Aaron Diamond AIDS Research Center, Columbia University Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons, New York, NY, United States
| | - Yicheng Guo
- Aaron Diamond AIDS Research Center, Columbia University Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons, New York, NY, United States
| | - David D. Ho
- Aaron Diamond AIDS Research Center, Columbia University Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons, New York, NY, United States
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Chen Z, Wang X, Chen X, Huang J, Wang C, Wang J, Wang Z. Accelerating therapeutic protein design with computational approaches toward the clinical stage. Comput Struct Biotechnol J 2023; 21:2909-2926. [PMID: 38213894 PMCID: PMC10781723 DOI: 10.1016/j.csbj.2023.04.027] [Citation(s) in RCA: 4] [Impact Index Per Article: 4.0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Track Full Text] [Download PDF] [Figures] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 02/15/2023] [Revised: 04/11/2023] [Accepted: 04/27/2023] [Indexed: 01/13/2024] Open
Abstract
Therapeutic protein, represented by antibodies, is of increasing interest in human medicine. However, clinical translation of therapeutic protein is still largely hindered by different aspects of developability, including affinity and selectivity, stability and aggregation prevention, solubility and viscosity reduction, and deimmunization. Conventional optimization of the developability with widely used methods, like display technologies and library screening approaches, is a time and cost-intensive endeavor, and the efficiency in finding suitable solutions is still not enough to meet clinical needs. In recent years, the accelerated advancement of computational methodologies has ushered in a transformative era in the field of therapeutic protein design. Owing to their remarkable capabilities in feature extraction and modeling, the integration of cutting-edge computational strategies with conventional techniques presents a promising avenue to accelerate the progression of therapeutic protein design and optimization toward clinical implementation. Here, we compared the differences between therapeutic protein and small molecules in developability and provided an overview of the computational approaches applicable to the design or optimization of therapeutic protein in several developability issues.
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Affiliation(s)
- Zhidong Chen
- Department of Pathology, The Eighth Affiliated Hospital, Sun Yat-sen University, Shenzhen 518033, China
- School of Pharmaceutical Sciences, Shenzhen Campus of Sun Yat-sen University, Shenzhen 518107, China
| | - Xinpei Wang
- School of Pharmaceutical Sciences, Shenzhen Campus of Sun Yat-sen University, Shenzhen 518107, China
| | - Xu Chen
- School of Pharmaceutical Sciences, Shenzhen Campus of Sun Yat-sen University, Shenzhen 518107, China
| | - Juyang Huang
- School of Pharmaceutical Sciences, Shenzhen Campus of Sun Yat-sen University, Shenzhen 518107, China
| | - Chenglin Wang
- Shenzhen Qiyu Biotechnology Co., Ltd, Shenzhen 518107, China
| | - Junqing Wang
- School of Pharmaceutical Sciences, Shenzhen Campus of Sun Yat-sen University, Shenzhen 518107, China
| | - Zhe Wang
- Department of Pathology, The Eighth Affiliated Hospital, Sun Yat-sen University, Shenzhen 518033, China
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30
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Oeller M, Kang R, Bell R, Ausserwöger H, Sormanni P, Vendruscolo M. Sequence-based prediction of pH-dependent protein solubility using CamSol. Brief Bioinform 2023; 24:7017367. [PMID: 36719110 PMCID: PMC10025429 DOI: 10.1093/bib/bbad004] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [MESH Headings] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 08/31/2022] [Revised: 12/10/2022] [Accepted: 10/16/2022] [Indexed: 02/01/2023] Open
Abstract
Solubility is a property of central importance for the use of proteins in research in molecular and cell biology and in applications in biotechnology and medicine. Since experimental methods for measuring protein solubility are material intensive and time consuming, computational methods have recently emerged to enable the rapid and inexpensive screening of solubility for large libraries of proteins, as it is routinely required in development pipelines. Here, we describe the development of one such method to include in the predictions the effect of the pH on solubility. We illustrate the resulting pH-dependent predictions on a variety of antibodies and other proteins to demonstrate that these predictions achieve an accuracy comparable with that of experimental methods. We make this method publicly available at https://www-cohsoftware.ch.cam.ac.uk/index.php/camsolph, as the version 3.0 of CamSol.
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Affiliation(s)
- Marc Oeller
- Centre for Misfolding Diseases, Yusuf Hamied Department of Chemistry, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK
| | - Ryan Kang
- Centre for Misfolding Diseases, Yusuf Hamied Department of Chemistry, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK
| | - Rosie Bell
- Centre for Misfolding Diseases, Yusuf Hamied Department of Chemistry, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK
| | - Hannes Ausserwöger
- Centre for Misfolding Diseases, Yusuf Hamied Department of Chemistry, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK
| | - Pietro Sormanni
- Centre for Misfolding Diseases, Yusuf Hamied Department of Chemistry, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK
| | - Michele Vendruscolo
- Centre for Misfolding Diseases, Yusuf Hamied Department of Chemistry, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK
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31
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Li T, Li Y, Zhu X, He Y, Wu Y, Ying T, Xie Z. Artificial intelligence in cancer immunotherapy: Applications in neoantigen recognition, antibody design and immunotherapy response prediction. Semin Cancer Biol 2023; 91:50-69. [PMID: 36870459 DOI: 10.1016/j.semcancer.2023.02.007] [Citation(s) in RCA: 8] [Impact Index Per Article: 8.0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 11/10/2022] [Revised: 02/13/2023] [Accepted: 02/28/2023] [Indexed: 03/06/2023]
Abstract
Cancer immunotherapy is a method of controlling and eliminating tumors by reactivating the body's cancer-immunity cycle and restoring its antitumor immune response. The increased availability of data, combined with advancements in high-performance computing and innovative artificial intelligence (AI) technology, has resulted in a rise in the use of AI in oncology research. State-of-the-art AI models for functional classification and prediction in immunotherapy research are increasingly used to support laboratory-based experiments. This review offers a glimpse of the current AI applications in immunotherapy, including neoantigen recognition, antibody design, and prediction of immunotherapy response. Advancing in this direction will result in more robust predictive models for developing better targets, drugs, and treatments, and these advancements will eventually make their way into the clinical setting, pushing AI forward in the field of precision oncology.
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Affiliation(s)
- Tong Li
- State Key Laboratory of Ophthalmology, Zhongshan Ophthalmic Center, Sun Yat-sen University, Guangzhou, China
| | - Yupeng Li
- State Key Laboratory of Ophthalmology, Zhongshan Ophthalmic Center, Sun Yat-sen University, Guangzhou, China
| | - Xiaoyi Zhu
- MOE/NHC Key Laboratory of Medical Molecular Virology, Shanghai Institute of Infectious Disease and Biosecurity, School of Basic Medical Sciences, Shanghai Medical College, Fudan University, Shanghai, China; Shanghai Engineering Research Center for Synthetic Immunology, Shanghai, China
| | - Yao He
- State Key Laboratory of Ophthalmology, Zhongshan Ophthalmic Center, Sun Yat-sen University, Guangzhou, China
| | - Yanling Wu
- MOE/NHC Key Laboratory of Medical Molecular Virology, Shanghai Institute of Infectious Disease and Biosecurity, School of Basic Medical Sciences, Shanghai Medical College, Fudan University, Shanghai, China; Shanghai Engineering Research Center for Synthetic Immunology, Shanghai, China
| | - Tianlei Ying
- MOE/NHC Key Laboratory of Medical Molecular Virology, Shanghai Institute of Infectious Disease and Biosecurity, School of Basic Medical Sciences, Shanghai Medical College, Fudan University, Shanghai, China; Shanghai Engineering Research Center for Synthetic Immunology, Shanghai, China.
| | - Zhi Xie
- State Key Laboratory of Ophthalmology, Zhongshan Ophthalmic Center, Sun Yat-sen University, Guangzhou, China; Center for Precision Medicine, Sun Yat-sen University, Guangzhou, China.
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32
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Tuameh A, Harding SE, Darton NJ. Methods for addressing host cell protein impurities in biopharmaceutical product development. Biotechnol J 2023; 18:e2200115. [PMID: 36427352 DOI: 10.1002/biot.202200115] [Citation(s) in RCA: 5] [Impact Index Per Article: 5.0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 03/07/2022] [Revised: 11/18/2022] [Accepted: 11/22/2022] [Indexed: 11/27/2022]
Abstract
The high demand for monoclonal antibody (mAb) therapeutics in recent years has resulted in significant efforts to improve their costly manufacturing process. The high cost of manufacturing mAbs derives mainly from the purification process, which contributes to 50%-80% of the total manufacturing cost. One of the main challenges facing industry at the purification stage is the clearance of host cell proteins (HCPs) that are produced and often co-purified with the desired mAb product. One of the issues HCPs can cause is the degradation of the final mAb protein product. In this review, techniques are considered that can be used at different stages (upstream and downstream) of mAb manufacture to improve HCP clearance. In addition to established techniques, many new approaches for HCP removal are discussed that have the potential to replace current methods for improving HCP reduction and thereby the quality and stability of the final mAb product.
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Affiliation(s)
- Abdulrahman Tuameh
- National Centre for Macromolecular Hydrodynamics, School of Biosciences, University of Nottingham, Sutton Bonington, UK
| | - Stephen E Harding
- National Centre for Macromolecular Hydrodynamics, School of Biosciences, University of Nottingham, Sutton Bonington, UK
| | - Nicholas J Darton
- Dosage Form Design and Development, BioPharmaceuticals R&D, AstraZeneca, Cambridge, UK
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33
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Parkinson J, Hard R, Wang W. The RESP AI model accelerates the identification of tight-binding antibodies. Nat Commun 2023; 14:454. [PMID: 36709319 PMCID: PMC9884274 DOI: 10.1038/s41467-023-36028-8] [Citation(s) in RCA: 10] [Impact Index Per Article: 10.0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Track Full Text] [Figures] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 07/31/2022] [Accepted: 01/13/2023] [Indexed: 01/30/2023] Open
Abstract
High-affinity antibodies are often identified through directed evolution, which may require many iterations of mutagenesis and selection to find an optimal candidate. Deep learning techniques hold the potential to accelerate this process but the existing methods cannot provide the confidence interval or uncertainty needed to assess the reliability of the predictions. Here we present a pipeline called RESP for efficient identification of high affinity antibodies. We develop a learned representation trained on over 3 million human B-cell receptor sequences to encode antibody sequences. We then develop a variational Bayesian neural network to perform ordinal regression on a set of the directed evolution sequences binned by off-rate and quantify their likelihood to be tight binders against an antigen. Importantly, this model can assess sequences not present in the directed evolution library and thus greatly expand the search space to uncover the best sequences for experimental evaluation. We demonstrate the power of this pipeline by achieving a 17-fold improvement in the KD of the PD-L1 antibody Atezolizumab and this success illustrates the potential of RESP in facilitating general antibody development.
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Affiliation(s)
- Jonathan Parkinson
- Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, University of California, San Diego, La Jolla, CA, 92093-0359, USA
| | - Ryan Hard
- Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, University of California, San Diego, La Jolla, CA, 92093-0359, USA
| | - Wei Wang
- Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, University of California, San Diego, La Jolla, CA, 92093-0359, USA. .,Department of Cellular and Molecular Medicine, University of California, San Diego, La Jolla, CA, 92093-0359, USA.
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34
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Khan A, Cowen-Rivers AI, Grosnit A, Deik DGX, Robert PA, Greiff V, Smorodina E, Rawat P, Akbar R, Dreczkowski K, Tutunov R, Bou-Ammar D, Wang J, Storkey A, Bou-Ammar H. Toward real-world automated antibody design with combinatorial Bayesian optimization. CELL REPORTS METHODS 2023; 3:100374. [PMID: 36814835 PMCID: PMC9939385 DOI: 10.1016/j.crmeth.2022.100374] [Citation(s) in RCA: 12] [Impact Index Per Article: 12.0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [MESH Headings] [Track Full Text] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 04/29/2022] [Revised: 10/08/2022] [Accepted: 12/07/2022] [Indexed: 06/14/2023]
Abstract
Antibodies are multimeric proteins capable of highly specific molecular recognition. The complementarity determining region 3 of the antibody variable heavy chain (CDRH3) often dominates antigen-binding specificity. Hence, it is a priority to design optimal antigen-specific CDRH3 to develop therapeutic antibodies. The combinatorial structure of CDRH3 sequences makes it impossible to query binding-affinity oracles exhaustively. Moreover, antibodies are expected to have high target specificity and developability. Here, we present AntBO, a combinatorial Bayesian optimization framework utilizing a CDRH3 trust region for an in silico design of antibodies with favorable developability scores. The in silico experiments on 159 antigens demonstrate that AntBO is a step toward practically viable in vitro antibody design. In under 200 calls to the oracle, AntBO suggests antibodies outperforming the best binding sequence from 6.9 million experimentally obtained CDRH3s. Additionally, AntBO finds very-high-affinity CDRH3 in only 38 protein designs while requiring no domain knowledge.
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Affiliation(s)
- Asif Khan
- School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh EH8 9YL, UK
| | | | | | | | - Philippe A. Robert
- Department of Immunology, University of Oslo and Oslo University Hospital, Oslo 0315, Norway
| | - Victor Greiff
- Department of Immunology, University of Oslo and Oslo University Hospital, Oslo 0315, Norway
| | - Eva Smorodina
- Department of Immunology, University of Oslo and Oslo University Hospital, Oslo 0315, Norway
| | - Puneet Rawat
- Department of Immunology, University of Oslo and Oslo University Hospital, Oslo 0315, Norway
| | - Rahmad Akbar
- Department of Immunology, University of Oslo and Oslo University Hospital, Oslo 0315, Norway
| | | | | | - Dany Bou-Ammar
- American University of Beirut Medical Centre, Beirut 11-0236, Lebanon
| | - Jun Wang
- Huawei Noah’s Ark Lab, London N1C 4AG, UK
- University College London, London WC1E 6BT, UK
| | - Amos Storkey
- School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh EH8 9YL, UK
| | - Haitham Bou-Ammar
- Huawei Noah’s Ark Lab, London N1C 4AG, UK
- University College London, London WC1E 6BT, UK
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35
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Lee FS, Anderson AG, Olafson BD. Benchmarking TriadAb using targets from the second antibody modeling assessment. Protein Eng Des Sel 2023; 36:gzad013. [PMID: 37864287 DOI: 10.1093/protein/gzad013] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [MESH Headings] [Grants] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 05/05/2023] [Revised: 08/10/2023] [Indexed: 10/22/2023] Open
Abstract
Computational modeling and design of antibodies has become an integral part of today's research and development in antibody therapeutics. Here we describe the Triad Antibody Homology Modeling (TriadAb) package, a functionality of the Triad protein design platform that predicts the structure of any heavy and light chain sequences of an antibody Fv domain using template-based modeling. To gauge the performance of TriadAb, we benchmarked against the results of the Second Antibody Modeling Assessment (AMA-II). On average, TriadAb produced main-chain carbonyl root-mean-square deviations between models and experimentally determined structures at 1.10 Å, 1.45 Å, 1.41 Å, 3.04 Å, 1.47 Å, 1.27 Å, 1.63 Å in the framework and the six complementarity-determining regions (H1, H2, H3, L1, L2, L3), respectively. The inaugural results are comparable to those reported in AMA-II, corroborating with our internal bench-based experiences that models generated using TriadAb are sufficiently accurate and useful for antibody engineering using the sequence design capabilities provided by Triad.
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36
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Modeling and affinity maturation of an anti-CD20 nanobody: a comprehensive in-silico investigation. Sci Rep 2023; 13:582. [PMID: 36631511 PMCID: PMC9834265 DOI: 10.1038/s41598-023-27926-4] [Citation(s) in RCA: 7] [Impact Index Per Article: 7.0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Track Full Text] [Figures] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 09/27/2022] [Accepted: 01/10/2023] [Indexed: 01/12/2023] Open
Abstract
B-cell Non-Hodgkin lymphomas are the malignancies of lymphocytes. CD20 is a membrane protein, which is highly expressed on the cell surface of the B-cells in NHL. Treatments using monoclonal antibodies (mAbs) have resulted in failure in some cases. Nanobodies (NBs), single-domain antibodies with low molecular weights and a high specificity in antigen recognition, could be practical alternatives for traditional mAbs with superior characteristics. To design an optimized NB as a candidate CD20 inhibitor with raised binding affinity to CD20, the structure of anti-CD20 NB was optimized to selectively target CD20. The 3D structure of the NB was constructed based on the optimal templates (6C5W and 5JQH), and the key residues were determined by applying a molecular docking study. After identifying the key residues, some mutations were introduced using a rational protocol to improve the binding affinity of the NB to CD20. The rational mutations were conducted using the experimental design (Taguchi method). Six residues (Ser27, Thr28, Phe29, Ile31, Asp99, and Asn100) were selected as the key residues, and five residues were targeted for rational mutation (Trp, Phe, His, Asp, and Tyr). Based on the mutations suggested by the experimental design, two optimized NB structures were constructed. NB2 showed a remarkable binding affinity to CD20 in docking studies with a binding energy of - 853 kcal/mol. The optimized NB was further evaluated using molecular dynamics simulation. The results revealed that CDR1 (complementarity determining regions1) and CDR3 are essential loops for recognizing the antigen. NB2 could be considered as a potential inhibitor of CD20, though experimental evaluations are needed to confirm it.
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37
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Luo X, Tong F, Zhao W, Zheng X, Li J, Li J, Zhao D. BERT2DAb: a pre-trained model for antibody representation based on amino acid sequences and 2D-structure. MAbs 2023; 15:2285904. [PMID: 38010801 DOI: 10.1080/19420862.2023.2285904] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [MESH Headings] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 06/25/2023] [Accepted: 11/16/2023] [Indexed: 11/29/2023] Open
Abstract
Prior research has generated a vast amount of antibody sequences, which has allowed the pre-training of language models on amino acid sequences to improve the efficiency of antibody screening and optimization. However, compared to those for proteins, there are fewer pre-trained language models available for antibody sequences. Additionally, existing pre-trained models solely rely on embedding representations using amino acids or k-mers, which do not explicitly take into account the role of secondary structure features. Here, we present a new pre-trained model called BERT2DAb. This model incorporates secondary structure information based on self-attention to learn representations of antibody sequences. Our model achieves state-of-the-art performance on three downstream tasks, including two antigen-antibody binding classification tasks (precision: 85.15%/94.86%; recall:87.41%/86.15%) and one antigen-antibody complex mutation binding free energy prediction task (Pearson correlation coefficient: 0.77). Moreover, we propose a novel method to analyze the relationship between attention weights and contact states of pairs of subsequences in tertiary structures. This enhances the interpretability of BERT2DAb. Overall, our model demonstrates strong potential for improving antibody screening and design through downstream applications.
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Affiliation(s)
- Xiaowei Luo
- Information Center, Academy of Military Medical Sciences, Beijing, China
| | - Fan Tong
- Information Center, Academy of Military Medical Sciences, Beijing, China
| | - Wenbin Zhao
- Information Center, Academy of Military Medical Sciences, Beijing, China
| | - Xiangwen Zheng
- Information Center, Academy of Military Medical Sciences, Beijing, China
| | - Jiangyu Li
- Information Center, Academy of Military Medical Sciences, Beijing, China
| | - Jing Li
- State Key Laboratory of Pathogen and Biosecurity, Beijing Institute of Microbiology and Epidemiology, Beijing, China
| | - Dongsheng Zhao
- Information Center, Academy of Military Medical Sciences, Beijing, China
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38
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Ambrosetti F, Jandova Z, Bonvin AMJJ. Information-Driven Antibody-Antigen Modelling with HADDOCK. Methods Mol Biol 2023; 2552:267-282. [PMID: 36346597 DOI: 10.1007/978-1-0716-2609-2_14] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [MESH Headings] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Indexed: 06/16/2023]
Abstract
In the recent years, therapeutic use of antibodies has seen a huge growth, "due to their inherent proprieties and technological advances in the methods used to study and characterize them. Effective design and engineering of antibodies for therapeutic purposes are heavily dependent on knowledge of the structural principles that regulate antibody-antigen interactions. Several experimental techniques such as X-ray crystallography, cryo-electron microscopy, NMR, or mutagenesis analysis can be applied, but these are usually expensive and time-consuming. Therefore computational approaches like molecular docking may offer a valuable alternative for the characterization of antibody-antigen complexes.Here we describe a protocol for the prediction of the 3D structure of antibody-antigen complexes using the integrative modelling platform HADDOCK. The protocol consists of (1) the identification of the antibody residues belonging to the hypervariable loops which are known to be crucial for the binding and can be used to guide the docking and (2) the detailed steps to perform docking with the HADDOCK 2.4 webserver following different strategies depending on the availability of information about epitope residues.
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Affiliation(s)
- Francesco Ambrosetti
- Computational Structural Biology Group, Bijvoet Centre for Biomolecular Research, Faculty of Science - Chemistry, Utrecht University, Utrecht, The Netherlands
| | - Zuzana Jandova
- Computational Structural Biology Group, Bijvoet Centre for Biomolecular Research, Faculty of Science - Chemistry, Utrecht University, Utrecht, The Netherlands
| | - Alexandre M J J Bonvin
- Computational Structural Biology Group, Bijvoet Centre for Biomolecular Research, Faculty of Science - Chemistry, Utrecht University, Utrecht, The Netherlands.
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39
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Pennell M, Rodriguez OL, Watson CT, Greiff V. The evolutionary and functional significance of germline immunoglobulin gene variation. Trends Immunol 2023; 44:7-21. [PMID: 36470826 DOI: 10.1016/j.it.2022.11.001] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 10/25/2022] [Accepted: 11/07/2022] [Indexed: 12/04/2022]
Abstract
The recombination between immunoglobulin (IG) gene segments determines an individual's naïve antibody repertoire and, consequently, (auto)antigen recognition. Emerging evidence suggests that mammalian IG germline variation impacts humoral immune responses associated with vaccination, infection, and autoimmunity - from the molecular level of epitope specificity, up to profound changes in the architecture of antibody repertoires. These links between IG germline variants and immunophenotype raise the question on the evolutionary causes and consequences of diversity within IG loci. We discuss why the extreme diversity in IG loci remains a mystery, why resolving this is important for the design of more effective vaccines and therapeutics, and how recent evidence from multiple lines of inquiry may help us do so.
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Affiliation(s)
- Matt Pennell
- Department of Quantitative and Computational Biology, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA, USA; Department of Biological Sciences, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA, USA.
| | - Oscar L Rodriguez
- Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Genetics, University of Louisville School of Medicine, Louisville, KY, USA
| | - Corey T Watson
- Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Genetics, University of Louisville School of Medicine, Louisville, KY, USA
| | - Victor Greiff
- Department of Immunology, University of Oslo and Oslo University Hospital, Oslo, Norway.
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40
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Yang YX, Wang P, Zhu BT. Binding affinity prediction for antibody-protein antigen complexes: A machine learning analysis based on interface and surface areas. J Mol Graph Model 2023; 118:108364. [PMID: 36356467 DOI: 10.1016/j.jmgm.2022.108364] [Citation(s) in RCA: 5] [Impact Index Per Article: 5.0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 07/06/2022] [Revised: 10/08/2022] [Accepted: 10/11/2022] [Indexed: 11/09/2022]
Abstract
Specific antibodies can bind to protein antigens with high affinity and specificity, and this property makes them one of the best protein-based therapeutics. Accurate prediction of antibody‒protein antigen binding affinity is crucial for designing effective antibodies. The current predictive methods for protein‒protein binding affinity usually fail to predict the binding affinity of an antibody‒protein antigen complex with a comparable level of accuracy. Here, new models specific for antibody‒antigen binding affinity prediction are developed according to the different types of interface and surface areas present in antibody‒antigen complex. The contacts-based descriptors are also employed to construct or train different models specific for antibody‒protein antigen binding affinity prediction. The results of this study show that (i) the area-based descriptors are slightly better than the contacts-based descriptors in terms of the predictive power; (ii) the new models specific for antibody‒protein antigen binding affinity prediction are superior to the previously-used general models for predicting the protein‒protein binding affinities; (iii) the performances of the best area-based and contacts-based models developed in this work are better than the performances of a recently-developed graph-based model (i.e., CSM-AB) specific for antibody‒protein antigen binding affinity prediction. The new models developed in this work would not only help understand the mechanisms underlying antibody‒protein antigen interactions, but would also be of some applicable utility in the design and virtual screening of antibody-based therapeutics.
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Affiliation(s)
- Yong Xiao Yang
- Shenzhen Key Laboratory of Steroid Drug Discovery and Development, School of Medicine, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen, Guangdong, 518172, China
| | - Pan Wang
- Shenzhen Key Laboratory of Steroid Drug Discovery and Development, School of Medicine, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen, Guangdong, 518172, China; Shenzhen Bay Laboratory, Shenzhen, 518055, China
| | - Bao Ting Zhu
- Shenzhen Key Laboratory of Steroid Drug Discovery and Development, School of Medicine, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen, Guangdong, 518172, China; Shenzhen Bay Laboratory, Shenzhen, 518055, China.
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41
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Fernández-Quintero ML, Ljungars A, Waibl F, Greiff V, Andersen JT, Gjølberg TT, Jenkins TP, Voldborg BG, Grav LM, Kumar S, Georges G, Kettenberger H, Liedl KR, Tessier PM, McCafferty J, Laustsen AH. Assessing developability early in the discovery process for novel biologics. MAbs 2023; 15:2171248. [PMID: 36823021 PMCID: PMC9980699 DOI: 10.1080/19420862.2023.2171248] [Citation(s) in RCA: 12] [Impact Index Per Article: 12.0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [MESH Headings] [Grants] [Track Full Text] [Figures] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 10/27/2022] [Accepted: 01/18/2023] [Indexed: 02/25/2023] Open
Abstract
Beyond potency, a good developability profile is a key attribute of a biological drug. Selecting and screening for such attributes early in the drug development process can save resources and avoid costly late-stage failures. Here, we review some of the most important developability properties that can be assessed early on for biologics. These include the influence of the source of the biologic, its biophysical and pharmacokinetic properties, and how well it can be expressed recombinantly. We furthermore present in silico, in vitro, and in vivo methods and techniques that can be exploited at different stages of the discovery process to identify molecules with liabilities and thereby facilitate the selection of the most optimal drug leads. Finally, we reflect on the most relevant developability parameters for injectable versus orally delivered biologics and provide an outlook toward what general trends are expected to rise in the development of biologics.
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Affiliation(s)
- Monica L. Fernández-Quintero
- Center for Molecular Biosciences Innsbruck (CMBI), Department of General, Inorganic and Theoretical Chemistry, University of Innsbruck, Innsbruck, Austria
| | - Anne Ljungars
- Department of Biotechnology and Biomedicine, Technical University of Denmark, Kongens Lyngby, Denmark
| | - Franz Waibl
- Center for Molecular Biosciences Innsbruck (CMBI), Department of General, Inorganic and Theoretical Chemistry, University of Innsbruck, Innsbruck, Austria
| | - Victor Greiff
- Department of Immunology, University of Oslo, Oslo, Norway
| | - Jan Terje Andersen
- Department of Immunology, University of Oslo, Oslo University Hospital Rikshospitalet, Oslo, Norway
- Institute of Clinical Medicine and Department of Pharmacology, University of Oslo, Oslo, Norway
| | | | - Timothy P. Jenkins
- Department of Biotechnology and Biomedicine, Technical University of Denmark, Kongens Lyngby, Denmark
| | - Bjørn Gunnar Voldborg
- National Biologics Facility, Department of Biotechnology and Biomedicine, Technical University of Denmark, Kongens Lyngby, Denmark
| | - Lise Marie Grav
- Department of Biotechnology and Biomedicine, Technical University of Denmark, Kongens Lyngby, Denmark
| | - Sandeep Kumar
- Biotherapeutics Discovery, Boehringer Ingelheim Pharmaceuticals Inc, Ridgefield, CT, USA
| | - Guy Georges
- Roche Pharma Research and Early Development, Large Molecule Research, Roche Innovation Center Munich, Penzberg, Germany
| | - Hubert Kettenberger
- Roche Pharma Research and Early Development, Large Molecule Research, Roche Innovation Center Munich, Penzberg, Germany
| | - Klaus R. Liedl
- Center for Molecular Biosciences Innsbruck (CMBI), Department of General, Inorganic and Theoretical Chemistry, University of Innsbruck, Innsbruck, Austria
| | - Peter M. Tessier
- Department of Chemical Engineering, Pharmaceutical Sciences and Biomedical Engineering, Biointerfaces Institute, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan, USA
| | - John McCafferty
- Department of Medicine, Cambridge Institute of Therapeutic Immunology and Infectious Disease, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK
- Maxion Therapeutics, Babraham Research Campus, Cambridge, UK
| | - Andreas H. Laustsen
- Department of Biotechnology and Biomedicine, Technical University of Denmark, Kongens Lyngby, Denmark
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42
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Thorsteinson N, Comeau SR, Kumar S. Structure-Based Optimization of Antibody-Based Biotherapeutics for Improved Developability: A Practical Guide for Molecular Modelers. Methods Mol Biol 2023; 2552:219-235. [PMID: 36346594 DOI: 10.1007/978-1-0716-2609-2_11] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [MESH Headings] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Indexed: 06/16/2023]
Abstract
A great effort to avoid known developability risks is now more often being made earlier during the lead candidate discovery and optimization phase of biotherapeutic drug development. Predictive computational strategies, used in the early stages of antibody discovery and development, to mitigate the risk of late-stage failure of antibody candidates, are highly valuable. Various structure-based methods exist for accurately predicting properties critical to developability, and, in this chapter, we discuss the history of their development and demonstrate how they can be used to filter large sets of candidates arising from target affinity screening and to optimize lead candidates for developability. Methods for modeling antibody structures from sequence and detecting post-translational modifications and chemical degradation liabilities are also discussed.
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Affiliation(s)
- Nels Thorsteinson
- Scientific Services Manager, Biologics, Chemical Computing Group ULC, Montreal, QC, Canada
| | - Stephen R Comeau
- Computational Biochemistry and Bioinformatics Group, Biotherapeutics Discovery, Boehringer Ingelheim Pharmaceutical Inc., Ridgefield, CT, USA
| | - Sandeep Kumar
- Computational Biochemistry and Bioinformatics Group, Biotherapeutics Discovery, Boehringer Ingelheim Pharmaceutical Inc., Ridgefield, CT, USA.
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43
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Miller NL, Clark T, Raman R, Sasisekharan R. Learned features of antibody-antigen binding affinity. Front Mol Biosci 2023; 10:1112738. [PMID: 36895805 PMCID: PMC9989197 DOI: 10.3389/fmolb.2023.1112738] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 11/30/2022] [Accepted: 01/18/2023] [Indexed: 02/23/2023] Open
Abstract
Defining predictors of antigen-binding affinity of antibodies is valuable for engineering therapeutic antibodies with high binding affinity to their targets. However, this task is challenging owing to the huge diversity in the conformations of the complementarity determining regions of antibodies and the mode of engagement between antibody and antigen. In this study, we used the structural antibody database (SAbDab) to identify features that can discriminate high- and low-binding affinity across a 5-log scale. First, we abstracted features based on previously learned representations of protein-protein interactions to derive 'complex' feature sets, which include energetic, statistical, network-based, and machine-learned features. Second, we contrasted these complex feature sets with additional 'simple' feature sets based on counts of contacts between antibody and antigen. By investigating the predictive potential of 700 features contained in the eight complex and simple feature sets, we observed that simple feature sets perform comparably to complex feature sets in classification of binding affinity. Moreover, combining features from all eight feature-sets provided the best classification performance (median cross-validation AUROC and F1-score of 0.72). Of note, classification performance is substantially improved when several sources of data leakage (e.g., homologous antibodies) are not removed from the dataset, emphasizing a potential pitfall in this task. We additionally observe a classification performance plateau across diverse featurization approaches, highlighting the need for additional affinity-labeled antibody-antigen structural data. The findings from our present study set the stage for future studies aimed at multiple-log enhancement of antibody affinity through feature-guided engineering.
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Affiliation(s)
- Nathaniel L Miller
- Department of Biological Engineering, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, United States.,Koch Institute of Integrative Cancer Research, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, United States
| | - Thomas Clark
- Department of Biological Engineering, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, United States.,Koch Institute of Integrative Cancer Research, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, United States
| | - Rahul Raman
- Department of Biological Engineering, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, United States.,Koch Institute of Integrative Cancer Research, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, United States
| | - Ram Sasisekharan
- Department of Biological Engineering, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, United States.,Koch Institute of Integrative Cancer Research, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, United States
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44
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Comeau SR, Thorsteinson N, Kumar S. Structural Considerations in Affinity Maturation of Antibody-Based Biotherapeutic Candidates. Methods Mol Biol 2023; 2552:309-321. [PMID: 36346600 DOI: 10.1007/978-1-0716-2609-2_17] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [MESH Headings] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Indexed: 06/16/2023]
Abstract
Affinity maturation is an important stage in biologic drug discovery as is the natural process of generating an immune response inside the human body. In this chapter, we describe in silico approaches to affinity maturation via a worked example. Both advantages and limitations of the computational methods used are critically examined. Furthermore, construction of affinity maturation libraries and how their outputs might be implemented in an experimental setting are also described. It should be noted that structure-based design of biologic drugs is an emerging field and the tools currently available require further development. Furthermore, there are no standardized structure-based strategies yet for antibody affinity maturation as this research relies heavily on scientific logic as well as creative intuition.
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Affiliation(s)
- Stephen R Comeau
- Computational Biochemistry and Bioinformatics Group, Biotherapeutics Discovery, Boehringer Ingelheim Pharmaceuticals Inc., Ridgefield, CT, USA
| | - Nels Thorsteinson
- Scientific Services Manager, Biologics, Chemical Computing Group ULC, Montreal, QC, Canada
| | - Sandeep Kumar
- Computational Biochemistry and Bioinformatics Group, Biotherapeutics Discovery, Boehringer Ingelheim Pharmaceuticals Inc., Ridgefield, CT, USA.
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45
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Bansia H, Ramakumar S. Homology Modeling of Antibody Variable Regions: Methods and Applications. Methods Mol Biol 2023; 2627:301-319. [PMID: 36959454 DOI: 10.1007/978-1-0716-2974-1_16] [Citation(s) in RCA: 1] [Impact Index Per Article: 1.0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Indexed: 03/25/2023]
Abstract
Adaptive immunity specifically protects us from antigenic challenges. Antibodies are key effector proteins of adaptive immunity, and they are remarkable in their ability to recognize a virtually limitless number of antigens. Fragment variable (FV), the antigen-binding region of antibodies, can be split into two main components, namely, framework and complementarity determining regions. The framework (FR) consists of light-chain framework (FRL) and heavy-chain framework (FRH). Similarly, the complementarity determining regions (CDRs) comprises of light-chain CDRs 1-3 (CDRs L1-3) and heavy-chain CDRs 1-3 (CDRs H1-3). While FRs are relatively constant in sequence and structure across diverse antibodies, sequence variation in CDRs leading to differential conformations of CDR loops accounts for the distinct antigenic specificities of diverse antibodies. The conserved structural features in FRs and conformity of CDRs to a limited set of standard conformations allow for the accurate prediction of FV models using homology modeling techniques. Antibody structure prediction from its amino acid sequence has numerous important applications including prediction of antibody-antigen interaction interfaces and redesign of therapeutically and biotechnologically useful antibodies with improved affinity. This chapter summarizes the current practices employed in the successful homology modeling of antibody variable regions and the potential applications of the generated homology models.
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Affiliation(s)
- Harsh Bansia
- Department of Physics, Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru, India.
- Advanced Science Research Center at The Graduate Center of the City University of New York, New York, NY, USA.
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46
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Childers MC, Daggett V. Molecular Dynamics Methods for Antibody Design. Methods Mol Biol 2023; 2552:109-124. [PMID: 36346588 DOI: 10.1007/978-1-0716-2609-2_5] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [MESH Headings] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Indexed: 06/16/2023]
Abstract
Complex and coordinated dynamics are closely connected with protein functions, including the binding of antibodies to antigens. Knowledge of such dynamics could improve the design of antibodies. Molecular dynamics (MD) simulations provide a "computational microscope" that can resolve atomic motions and inform antibody design efforts.
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Affiliation(s)
| | - Valerie Daggett
- Department of Bioengineering, University of Washington, Seattle, WA, USA.
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47
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Sulea T, Deprez C, Corbeil CR, Purisima EO. Optimizing Antibody-Antigen Binding Affinities with the ADAPT Platform. Methods Mol Biol 2023; 2552:361-374. [PMID: 36346603 DOI: 10.1007/978-1-0716-2609-2_20] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [MESH Headings] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Indexed: 06/16/2023]
Abstract
The ADAPT (Assisted Design of Antibody and Protein Therapeutics) platform guides the selection of mutants that improve/modulate the affinity of antibodies and other biologics. Predicted affinities are based on a consensus z-score from three scoring functions. Computational predictions are interleaved with experimental validation, significantly enhancing the robustness of the design and selection of mutants. A key step is an initial exhaustive virtual single-mutant scan that identifies hot spots and the mutations predicted to improve affinity. A small number of proposed single mutants are then produced and assayed. Only the validated single mutants (i.e., having improved affinity) are used to design double and higher-order mutants in subsequent rounds of design, avoiding the combinatorial explosion that arises from random mutagenesis. Typically, with a total of about 30-50 designed single, double, and triple mutants, affinity improvements of 10- to 100-fold are obtained.
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Affiliation(s)
- Traian Sulea
- National Research Council Canada, Human Health Therapeutics Research Centre, Montreal, QC, Canada
| | - Christophe Deprez
- National Research Council Canada, Human Health Therapeutics Research Centre, Montreal, QC, Canada
| | - Christopher R Corbeil
- National Research Council Canada, Human Health Therapeutics Research Centre, Montreal, QC, Canada
| | - Enrico O Purisima
- National Research Council Canada, Human Health Therapeutics Research Centre, Montreal, QC, Canada.
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48
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Robert PA, Akbar R, Frank R, Pavlović M, Widrich M, Snapkov I, Slabodkin A, Chernigovskaya M, Scheffer L, Smorodina E, Rawat P, Mehta BB, Vu MH, Mathisen IF, Prósz A, Abram K, Olar A, Miho E, Haug DTT, Lund-Johansen F, Hochreiter S, Haff IH, Klambauer G, Sandve GK, Greiff V. Unconstrained generation of synthetic antibody-antigen structures to guide machine learning methodology for antibody specificity prediction. NATURE COMPUTATIONAL SCIENCE 2022; 2:845-865. [PMID: 38177393 DOI: 10.1038/s43588-022-00372-4] [Citation(s) in RCA: 12] [Impact Index Per Article: 6.0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [MESH Headings] [Grants] [Track Full Text] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 07/16/2021] [Accepted: 11/09/2022] [Indexed: 01/06/2024]
Abstract
Machine learning (ML) is a key technology for accurate prediction of antibody-antigen binding. Two orthogonal problems hinder the application of ML to antibody-specificity prediction and the benchmarking thereof: the lack of a unified ML formalization of immunological antibody-specificity prediction problems and the unavailability of large-scale synthetic datasets to benchmark real-world relevant ML methods and dataset design. Here we developed the Absolut! software suite that enables parameter-based unconstrained generation of synthetic lattice-based three-dimensional antibody-antigen-binding structures with ground-truth access to conformational paratope, epitope and affinity. We formalized common immunological antibody-specificity prediction problems as ML tasks and confirmed that for both sequence- and structure-based tasks, accuracy-based rankings of ML methods trained on experimental data hold for ML methods trained on Absolut!-generated data. The Absolut! framework has the potential to enable real-world relevant development and benchmarking of ML strategies for biotherapeutics design.
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Affiliation(s)
- Philippe A Robert
- Department of Immunology, University of Oslo and Oslo University Hospital, Oslo, Norway.
| | - Rahmad Akbar
- Department of Immunology, University of Oslo and Oslo University Hospital, Oslo, Norway
| | - Robert Frank
- Department of Immunology, University of Oslo and Oslo University Hospital, Oslo, Norway
| | | | - Michael Widrich
- ELLIS Unit Linz and LIT AI Lab, Institute for Machine Learning, Johannes Kepler University Linz, Linz, Austria
| | - Igor Snapkov
- Department of Immunology, University of Oslo and Oslo University Hospital, Oslo, Norway
| | - Andrei Slabodkin
- Department of Immunology, University of Oslo and Oslo University Hospital, Oslo, Norway
| | - Maria Chernigovskaya
- Department of Immunology, University of Oslo and Oslo University Hospital, Oslo, Norway
| | | | - Eva Smorodina
- Department of Immunology, University of Oslo and Oslo University Hospital, Oslo, Norway
| | - Puneet Rawat
- Department of Immunology, University of Oslo and Oslo University Hospital, Oslo, Norway
| | - Brij Bhushan Mehta
- Department of Immunology, University of Oslo and Oslo University Hospital, Oslo, Norway
| | - Mai Ha Vu
- Department of Linguistics and Scandinavian Studies, University of Oslo, Oslo, Norway
| | | | - Aurél Prósz
- Danish Cancer Society Research Center, Translational Cancer Genomics, Copenhagen, Denmark
| | - Krzysztof Abram
- The Novo Nordisk Foundation Center for Biosustainability, Autoflow, DTU Biosustain and IT University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark
| | - Alex Olar
- Department of Complex Systems in Physics, Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest, Hungary
| | - Enkelejda Miho
- Institute of Medical Engineering and Medical Informatics, School of Life Sciences, FHNW University of Applied Sciences and Arts Northwestern Switzerland, Muttenz, Switzerland
- aiNET GmbH, Basel, Switzerland
- Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics, Lausanne, Switzerland
| | | | | | - Sepp Hochreiter
- ELLIS Unit Linz and LIT AI Lab, Institute for Machine Learning, Johannes Kepler University Linz, Linz, Austria
- Institute of Advanced Research in Artificial Intelligence (IARAI), Vienna, Austria
| | | | - Günter Klambauer
- ELLIS Unit Linz and LIT AI Lab, Institute for Machine Learning, Johannes Kepler University Linz, Linz, Austria
| | | | - Victor Greiff
- Department of Immunology, University of Oslo and Oslo University Hospital, Oslo, Norway.
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49
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Kalim M, Ali H, Rehman AU, Lu Y, Zhan J. Bioengineering and computational analysis of programmed cell death ligand-1 monoclonal antibody. Front Immunol 2022; 13:1012499. [PMID: 36341340 PMCID: PMC9633666 DOI: 10.3389/fimmu.2022.1012499] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [MESH Headings] [Track Full Text] [Download PDF] [Figures] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 08/05/2022] [Accepted: 10/03/2022] [Indexed: 11/18/2022] Open
Abstract
The trans-membrane proteins of the B7 family programmed cell death ligand-1 (PD-L1) and programmed death-1 (PD-1) play important roles in inhibiting immune responses and enhancing self-tolerance via T-cell modulation. Several therapeutic antibodies are used to promote T-cell proliferation by preventing interactions between PD-1/PD-L1. Recombinant technology appears to be quite useful in the production of such potent antibodies. In this study, we constructed recombinant molecules by cloning variable regions of the PD-L1 molecule into pMH3 vectors and transferring them into mammalian cell lines for expression. G418 supplementation was used to screen the recombinant clones, which were then maintained on serum-free medium. The full-length antibody was isolated and purified from the medium supernatant at a concentration of 0.5-0.8 mg/ml. Antibody binding affinity was investigated using ELISA and immunofluorescence methods. The protein-protein interactions (PPI) were determined using a docking approach. The SWISS model was utilized for homology modeling, while ZDOCK, Chimera, and PyMOL were used to validate 3D models. The Ramachandran plots were constructed using the SWISS model, which revealed that high-quality structures had a value of more than 90%. Current technologies allow for the accurate determination of antigen-antibody interactions.
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Affiliation(s)
- Muhammad Kalim
- Department of Biochemistry and Cancer Institute of the Second Affiliated Hospital, Zhejiang University, School of Medicine, Hangzhou, China
- *Correspondence: Muhammad Kalim, ; Jinbiao Zhan, ; Hamid Ali,
| | - Hamid Ali
- Department of Biosciences, COMSATS University, Islamabad, Pakistan
- *Correspondence: Muhammad Kalim, ; Jinbiao Zhan, ; Hamid Ali,
| | - Ashfaq Ur Rehman
- Department of Molecular Biology and Biochemistry, University of California, Irvine, Irvine, CA, United States
| | - Yong Lu
- Laboratory of Minigene Pharmacy, School of Life Science and Technology, China Pharmaceutical University, Tongjia Xiang, Nanjing, China
| | - Jinbiao Zhan
- Department of Biochemistry and Cancer Institute of the Second Affiliated Hospital, Zhejiang University, School of Medicine, Hangzhou, China
- *Correspondence: Muhammad Kalim, ; Jinbiao Zhan, ; Hamid Ali,
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50
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Ding Z, Zhang X, Li H. Application of IgG antibody titer and subtype in diagnosis and severity assessment of hemolytic disease of the newborn. Transl Pediatr 2022; 11:1544-1551. [PMID: 36247885 PMCID: PMC9561511 DOI: 10.21037/tp-22-385] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Track Full Text] [Download PDF] [Figures] [Journal Information] [Submit a Manuscript] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 07/26/2022] [Accepted: 08/26/2022] [Indexed: 11/19/2022] Open
Abstract
BACKGROUND To analyze the effect of different times of pregnancy of type O pregnant women on the occurrence of ABO hemolytic disease of the newborn (ABO-HDN). METHODS From December 2018 to December 2021, 725 pregnant women with O blood group (husbands with non-O blood group) who met the inclusion criteria were collected. There were 116 cases of ABO-HDN, which were summarized and analyzed. The pregnant women were divided into primigravida and non-primigravida groups. The influence of the number of pregnancies on the occurrence of ABO-HDN was compared, and the antibody titer of pregnant women with type O blood was monitored. The relationship between antibody titer and HDN in pregnant women was analyzed by hemolysis test and indirect bilirubin concentration. RESULTS In the primigravida group, 0 patients with HDN had a titer ≤1:64, 8 (8/26) had a titer of 1:128, 9 (9/20) had a titer of 1:256, 2 (2/4) had a titer of 1:512, and 2 (2/3) had a titer >1:512. In the non-primigravida group, there were 0 cases with a titer ≤1:64, 32 cases (32/78) with a titer of 1:128, and 26 cases (26/46) with a titer of 1:256. The number of cases of ABO incompatibility in maternal and infant groups with different titers of IgG anti-A (B) antibody were 377 cases in the <1:64 group, 130 cases in the 1:64 group, 104 cases in the 1:128 group, 66 cases in the 1:256 group, 32 cases in the 1:512 group, and 16 cases in the >1:512 group. The positive rates of ABO-HDN were 0.0% (0/0), 0.0% (0/0), 38.5% (40/104), 53.0% (35/66), 81.3% (26/32) and 93.8% (15/16), respectively, and the difference was statistically significant (P<0.05). CONCLUSIONS The occurrence of ABO-HDN was not significantly related to the blood type of the pregnant woman's husband. Therefore, in order to reduce the degree of hemolysis and avoid the occurrence of bilirubin encephalopathy or even death, pregnant women with antibody titer >1:64 in second or subsequent pregnancies should be closely monitored.
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Affiliation(s)
- Zijun Ding
- Department of Neonatology, Shanxi Provincial Children's Hospital, Taiyuan, China
| | - Xinhua Zhang
- Department of Neonatology, Shanxi Provincial Children's Hospital, Taiyuan, China
| | - Hai Li
- Department of Neonatology, Shanxi Provincial Children's Hospital, Taiyuan, China
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