Computational Antibody Papers
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2025
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2025-10-28
peleke-1: A Suite of Protein Language Models Fine-Tuned for Targeted Antibody Sequence Generation
- language models
- generative methods
- Novel LLM suite for designing antibodies.
- Peleke-1 models were fine-tuned on 9,500 antibody–antigen complexes from SAbDab, each annotated with interacting residues identified from crystal structures.
- Structure was incorporated by annotating epitope residues explicitly in antigen sequences, allowing the LLMs to learn binding context without direct 3D input.
- Generated antibodies were assessed for humanness, structural validity, stability (FoldX), and binding affinity (HADDOCK3) across seven benchmark antigens.
- No wet-lab testing was performed.
2025-10-16
Revealing bias in antibody language models through systematic training data processing with OAS-explore
- language models
- databases
- Investigation how biases in the Observed Antibody Space (OAS) database, such as overrepresentation of a few donors and limited species or chain diversity, affect the performance and generalizability of antibody language models.
- The authors developed OAS-explore, an open-source pipeline to analyze, filter, balance, and sample OAS data by donor, species, chain type, and publication, enabling systematic assessment of data biases.
- By training 17 RoBERTa models on datasets with different compositions, they found that models struggle to generalize across chain types, species, individuals, and batches, and that even increased donor diversity alone does not guarantee better performance.
- They recommend systematic preprocessing, inclusion of more diverse data, and open sharing of datasets and pipelines to mitigate biases and improve antibody LM robustness.
2025-09-12
ImmunoMatch learns and predicts cognate pairing of heavy and light immunoglobulin chains
- language models
- Novel model to predict the heavy/light chain compatibility
- Data: H/L with the same single-cell barcode; negatives = swap L chains between pairs but only if CDRL3 length matches; balanced set of 233,880 pairs with a 90/10 train–test split.
- Training: Full VH+VL into AntiBERTa2 with a classification head; fine-tuned 3 epochs, lr 2×10⁻⁵, weight decay 0.01; κ/λ-specific variants trained identically. Final AUC-ROC 0.75 (withheld) and 0.66 (external); κ/λ models: 0.885/0.831.
- Baselines: (i) V/J gene-usage → logistic reg. & XGBoost ≈ 0.50–0.52 acc.; (ii) CDRH3+CDRL3 CNNs → moderate; (iii) ESM-2 improves with fine-tuning but AntiBERTa2 FT is best.
- It seems to do better than just ‘matching to the database’. Weak gene-usage baselines, explicit control of CDRL3 length in negatives, external generalisation, and sensitivity to interface residues (CDRH1/2 & framework) in therapeutic-antibody tests argue the model learns sequence-level pairing rules, not just V/L distributions.
- Demonstration showing how large language models (LLMs) can be adapted to reduce the computational cost of molecular dynamics (MD).
- They use the FoldToken encoding to discretize protein 3D conformations into tokens compatible with Mistral, and fine-tune the LLM on short MD trajectories of a single state. The model is then able to generate new sequences of conformations by predicting the next frame from previous frames.
- After fine-tuning, the model can extend trajectories beyond the training data. Starting from a native state, it can discover alternative conformations potential for bypassing kinetic barriers that normally require long MD runs.
- The approach is system-specific (requires an MD trajectory for each protein), does not yet encode thermodynamics/kinetics explicitly, and relies on the choice of structural tokenization.
2025-07-25
NextGenPLM: A Novel Structure-Infused Foundational Protein Language Model for Antibody Discovery and Optimization
- language models
- epitope prediction
- Novel protein language model with applications to epitope prediction and ranking hits in campaigns.
- NextGenPLM introduces a modular, multimodal transformer that fuses frozen pretrained protein language models with structural information via spectral contact-map embeddings, enabling efficient modeling of multi-chain antibody–antigen complexes without requiring full 3D folding of antibodies.
- The model was benchmarked on 112 diverse antibody–antigen complexes against state-of-the-art structure predictors (Chai-1 and Boltz-1x), matching their contact-map and epitope prediction accuracy while achieving ~100× higher throughput (4 complexes/sec vs. ~1 min/complex).
- The model was experimentally validated through an internal affinity-maturation campaign. Using its predictions to rank antibody variants led to designs that achieved up to 17× binding affinity improvements over the wild-type, as confirmed by surface plasmon resonance (SPR) assays.
- A novel antibody-specific language model, trained on paired human antibody data, and explicitly designed for practical antibody engineering applications.
- The model was trained on a carefully curated dataset of productive, paired sequences, prioritizing biological fidelity over sheer volume or data heterogeneity.
- It uses a masked language modelling (MLM) objective. The initial version was based on RoBERTa, while later versions introduced custom architectural modifications tailored to antibody sequences.
- The model was benchmarked on recapitulating clinical humanization decisions and outperformed prior models such as Sapiens and AntiBERTa.
- It was applied to redesign an existing therapeutic antibody, generating variants with retained or improved affinity, reduced predicted liabilities, and confirmed in vitro performance, including CHO expression and binding assays.
2025-06-24
Benchmark for Antibody Binding Affinity Maturation and Design
- binding prediction
- language models
- generative methods
- databases
- Benchmark of machine learning models for antibody-antigen binding affinity.
- A curated dataset of over 150,000 antibody-antigen complexes with associated experimental affinity values is compiled from literature.
- The benchmark compares a wide range of model types: language models, inverse folding models, graph-based, and diffusion-based generative models.
- Inverse folding models that are globally structure-aware perform best.
- General protein models like ESM-IF and ProteinMPNN outperform antibody-specific models such as AntiFold, DiffAb, and dyMEAN.
- Surprisingly, ESM-3 underperforms relative to ESM-IF, despite incorporating structural signals and improving upon earlier ESM models.
- Novel LLM (MINT) that natively encapsulates protein protein interactions.
- MINT (Multimeric INteraction Transformer) extends the ESM-2 protein language model by incorporating a cross-chain attention mechanism. This allows it to process multiple protein sequences simultaneously while preserving inter-sequence relationships and contextual information critical for modeling protein-protein interactions.
- MINT was trained on a large, curated subset of the STRING database, consisting of 96 million high-quality physical protein-protein interactions and 16.4 million unique protein sequences. The training employed a masked language modeling objective adapted for multimeric inputs.
- MINT was benchmarked on several general protein interaction tasks including binary interaction classification, binding affinity prediction (PDB-Bind), and mutational impact prediction (e.g., SKEMPI and MutationalPPI). It consistently outperformed existing PLMs, achieving state-of-the-art performance on multiple datasets such as a 29% improvement over baselines in SKEMPI.
- MINT outperformed antibody-specific models (e.g., IgBert, IgT5, and AbMap) on the FLAB benchmark and SARS-CoV-2 antibody mutant binding prediction tasks. It showed >10% performance improvement on three FLAB datasets and a 14% gain in low-data settings (0.5% training data) for SARS-CoV-2 binding predictions.
- AbMAP - Language model transfer learning framework with applications to antibody engineering.
- Authors address the process of dichotomy of language models in antibodies - either one uses a bare-bones protein model like ESM or only antibody model like Antiberty/IgLM. Normal protein models will not capture hypervariability of CDRs whereas antibody models would focus too much on the framework. They focus solely on CDRs + flanking regions as a solution.
- They show their applicability to three off the shelf models with structure template finding as well as low-n generative modeling.
2025-03-31
IgCraft: A versatile sequence generation framework for antibody discovery and engineering
- generative methods
- language models
- Novel generative model for antibodies that allows one to fill in, inpaint inverse fold etc.
- The model employs Bayesian Flow Networks which is somewhat similar to diffusion.
- The model is trained on data from OAS - unpaired data as a first pass and paired data as a second pass.
- Models are benchmarked on a range of computational metrics, chiefly sequence recovery (for infiling/inverse folding).
- Developability is checked by computational prediction of solubility (CamSol) and humanness (AbNativ)