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

Autor: Rahmad Akbar, Philippe A. Robert, Cédric R. Weber, Michael Widrich, Robert Frank, Milena Pavlović, Lonneke Scheffer, Maria Chernigovskaya, Igor Snapkov, Andrei Slabodkin, Brij Bhushan Mehta, Enkelejda Miho, Fridtjof Lund-Johansen, Jan Terje Andersen, Sepp Hochreiter, Ingrid Hobæk Haff, Günter Klambauer, Geir Kjetil Sandve, Victor Greiff
Jazyk: angličtina
Rok vydání: 2022
Předmět:
Zdroj: mAbs, Vol 14, Iss 1 (2022)
Druh dokumentu: article
ISSN: 19420862
1942-0870
1942-0862
DOI: 10.1080/19420862.2022.2031482
Popis: 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.
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