Cited by 94Monoclonal and Polyclonal Antibodies Researchvaccines and immunoinformatics approachesComputational Drug Discovery Methods

In silico proof of principle of machine learning-based antibody design at unconstrained scale

Open access
Akbar, Rahmad, Robert, Philippe A., Weber, Cédric R., Widrich, Michael, Frank, Robert, Pavlović, Milena, Scheffer, Lonneke, Chernigovskaya, Maria +11 more·2022·mAbs

Published version of a preprint

Abstract

Generative machine learning (ML) has been postulated to become a major driver in the computational design of antigen-specific monoclonal antibodies (mAb). However, efforts to confirm this hypothesis have been hindered by the infeasibility of testing arbitrarily large numbers of antibody sequences for their most critical design parameters: paratope, epitope, affinity, and developability. To address this challenge, we leveraged a lattice-based antibody-antigen binding simulation framework, which incorporates a wide range of physiological antibody-binding parameters. The simulation framework enables the computation of synthetic antibody-antigen 3D-structures, and it functions as an oracle for unrestricted prospective evaluation and benchmarking of antibody design parameters of ML-generated antibody sequences. We found that a deep generative model, trained exclusively on antibody sequence (one dimensional: 1D) data can be used to design conformational (three dimensional: 3D) epitope-specific antibodies, matching, or exceeding the training dataset in affinity and developability parameter value variety. Furthermore, we established a lower threshold of sequence diversity necessary for high-accuracy generative antibody ML and demonstrated that this lower threshold also holds on experimental real-world data. Finally, we show that transfer learning enables the generation of high-affinity antibody sequences from low-N training data. Our work establishes a priori feasibility and the theoretical foundation of high-throughput ML-based mAb design.

The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.

Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.

A few free checks a day · papers already verified open instantly · results are public

Integrity signals

Registry

Crossref · 10.1080/19420862.2022.2031482

Cites

81 of 81 references verified0 citation errors · 0 not checkable

Statistics

Claims the paper makes

The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.

Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.

A few free checks a day · papers already verified open instantly · results are public

Claims other papers make about this one

Each is checked against this paper’s own text: does it say what the citing paper says it does?

  • Akbar et al. showed promising performance in predicting binding affinity to 3D antigen structures using sequence information alone.

    “Akbar et al. [61] have shown promising performance in predicting binding affinity to 3D antigen structures using sequence information alone.”

Self-check

Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.

The self-check needs the paper’s full text.

Cites

Flagged first, then by citations

Research works printed but not linked: 5

  1. [6]Torjesen I. Drug development: the journey of a medicine from lab to shelf. Pharm J [Internet] 2015; Available from: https://www.pharmaceutical-journal.com/publications/tomorrows-pharmacist/drug-development-the-journey-of-a-medicine-from-lab-to-shelf/20068196.article?firstPass=false
  2. [22]Shuai RW, Ruffolo JA, Gray JJ. Generative language modeling for antibody design [Internet]. bioRxiv2021 [cited 2022 Jan 15]; 2021.12.13.472419. Available from: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/ 10.1101/2021.12.13.472419v1 · DOI
  3. [24]Goodfellow I, Pouget-Abadie J, Mirza M, Xu B, Warde-Farley D, Ozair S, Courville A, Bengio Y. Generative Adversarial Nets. In: Ghahramani Z, Welling M, Cortes C, Lawrence ND, Weinberger KQ editors. Advances in neural information processing systems 27. Massachusetts: Curran Associates, Inc.; 2014. p. 2672– 80.
  4. [32]Robert PA, Akbar R, Frank R, Pavlović M, Widrich M, Snapkov I, Chernigovskaya M, Scheffer L, Slabodkin A, Mehta BB, et al. One billion synthetic 3D-antibody-antigen complexes enable unconstrained machine-learning formalized investigation of antibody specificity prediction. 2021. [Internet]. Available from. doi: 10.1101/2021.07.06.451258. · DOI
  5. [65]Jiménez-Luna J, Grisoni F, Schneider G. Drug discovery with explainable artificial intelligence [ Internet]. arXiv [cs.AI]2020; Available from: http://arxiv.org/abs/2007.00523 · arXiv

Cited by

Sorted by citations

Authors
Akbar, R., Robert, P. A., Weber, C. R., Widrich, M., Frank, R., Pavlović, M., Scheffer, L., Chernigovskaya, M., Snapkov, I., Slabodkin, A., Mehta, B. B., Miho, E., Lund-Johansen, F., Andersen, J. T., Hochreiter, S., Hobæk Haff, I., Klambauer, G., Sandve, G. K., & Greiff, V.
Affiliations
  • Oslo University Hospital (NO)
  • ETH Zurich (CH)
  • Johannes Kepler University of Linz (AT)
  • University of Oslo (NO)
  • FHNW University of Applied Sciences and Arts Northwestern Switzerland (CH)
  • Department of Immunology, Oslo University Hospital Rikshospitalet and University of Oslo, Norway
  • Department of Mathematics, University of Oslo, Oslo, Norway
Corresponding author
  • Akbar, Rahmad
  • Greiff, Victor
Venue
mAbs
Published
2022-04-04
Volume
14
Issue
1
Pages
2031482-2031482
ISSN
  • 1942-0862 (ISSN-L)
  • 1942-0870
OpenAlex
W4225693775
Cited by
94
References
74
Citations by year
2026: 8 · 2025: 17 · 2024: 31 · 2023: 19 · 2022: 14 · 2021: 5
FWCI
11.52
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
Locations
  • mAbs (publishedVersion, cc-by-nc)
  • bioRxiv (Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory) (acceptedVersion, cc-by-nc-nd)
  • PubMed Central (publishedVersion, cc-by-nc)
  • PubMed (publishedVersion)
  • DOAJ (DOAJ: Directory of Open Access Journals) (submittedVersion, cc-by-sa)
  • NORA - Norwegian Open Research Archives (submittedVersion, cc-by-nc)
  • Repository for Publications and Research Data (ETH Zurich) (submittedVersion, cc-by-nc)
  • ETH Zürich Research Collection
Funders
  • the Leona M.and Harry B.Helmsley Charitable Trust (#2019PG-T1D011)
  • UiO World-Leading Research Community
  • LifeScience Convergence Environment Immunolingo
  • EU Horizon 2020 iReceptorplus (825821)
  • Research Council of Norway FRIPRO (300740)
  • Research Council of Norway IKTPLUSS (311341)
  • Norwegian Cancer Society (215817)
Topics
  • Health Sciences › Medicine › Radiology, Nuclear Medicine and Imaging › Monoclonal and Polyclonal Antibodies Research
  • Life Sciences › Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology › Molecular Biology › vaccines and immunoinformatics approaches
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Computational Theory and Mathematics › Computational Drug Discovery Methods
Keywords
monoclonal antibodies, epitope-specific antibodies, antibody binding sites, lattice simulation, deep generative models, antibody affinity, developability, sequence diversity, transfer learning
MeSH terms
Machine Learning, Antibodies, Monoclonal, Antigen-Antibody Reactions, Epitopes, Binding Sites, Antibody

About these checks

Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.

Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.

Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.

What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›

Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review