Toward generalizable prediction of antibody thermostability using machine learning on sequence and structure features

Autor: Ameya Harmalkar, Roshan Rao, Yuxuan Richard Xie, Jonas Honer, Wibke Deisting, Jonas Anlahr, Anja Hoenig, Julia Czwikla, Eva Sienz-Widmann, Doris Rau, Austin J. Rice, Timothy P. Riley, Danqing Li, Hannah B. Catterall, Christine E. Tinberg, Jeffrey J. Gray, Kathy Y. Wei
Jazyk: angličtina
Rok vydání: 2023
Předmět:
Zdroj: mAbs, Vol 15, Iss 1 (2023)
Druh dokumentu: article
ISSN: 19420862
1942-0870
1942-0862
DOI: 10.1080/19420862.2022.2163584
Popis: ABSTRACTOver the last three decades, the appeal for monoclonal antibodies (mAbs) as therapeutics has been steadily increasing as evident with FDA’s recent landmark approval of the 100th mAb. Unlike mAbs that bind to single targets, multispecific biologics (msAbs) have garnered particular interest owing to the advantage of engaging distinct targets. One important modular component of msAbs is the single-chain variable fragment (scFv). Despite the exquisite specificity and affinity of these scFv modules, their relatively poor thermostability often hampers their development as a potential therapeutic drug. In recent years, engineering antibody sequences to enhance their stability by mutations has gained considerable momentum. As experimental methods for antibody engineering are time-intensive, laborious and expensive, computational methods serve as a fast and inexpensive alternative to conventional routes. In this work, we show two machine learning approaches – one with pre-trained language models (PTLM) capturing functional effects of sequence variation, and second, a supervised convolutional neural network (CNN) trained with Rosetta energetic features – to better classify thermostable scFv variants from sequence. Both of these models are trained over temperature-specific data (TS50 measurements) derived from multiple libraries of scFv sequences. On out-of-distribution (refers to the fact that the out-of-distribution sequnes are blind to the algorithm) sequences, we show that a sufficiently simple CNN model performs better than general pre-trained language models trained on diverse protein sequences (average Spearman correlation coefficient, [Formula: see text], of 0.4 as opposed to 0.15). On the other hand, an antibody-specific language model performs comparatively better than the CNN model on the same task ([Formula: see text] 0.52). Further, we demonstrate that for an independent mAb with available thermal melting temperatures for 20 experimentally characterized thermostable mutations, these models trained on TS50 data could identify 18 residue positions and 5 identical amino-acid mutations showing remarkable generalizability. Our results suggest that such models can be broadly applicable for improving the biological characteristics of antibodies. Further, transferring such models for alternative physicochemical properties of scFvs can have potential applications in optimizing large-scale production and delivery of mAbs or bsAbs.
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