Computational Antibody Papers
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TitleKey points
- Introduced a novel model, Chai-2, that shows over 100× improvement in de novo antibody design success rates compared to prior methods.
- The model is prompted with the structure of the target, epitope residues, and desired antibody format (e.g., scFv or VHH).
- Benchmarking was performed on 52 antigens that had no known antibodies in the PDB, ensuring evaluation on novel, unbiased targets.
- Generated antibodies were structurally and sequentially dissimilar to any known antibodies, indicating that Chai-2 designs novel binders, not memorized ones.
- For VHH (nanobody) formats, the model achieved an experimental hit rate of 20%, validated in a single experimental round.
2025-06-24
REPURPOSING ALPHAFOLD3-LIKE PROTEIN FOLDING MODELS FOR ANTIBODY SEQUENCE AND STRUCTURE CO-DESIGN
- generative methods
- protein design
- Novel method to design antibodies based on boltz-1.
- They added a sequence head to boltz-1 to perform simultaneous sequence/structure co-design.
- They employed data from SAbDab to fine-tune boltz-1 on antibody-antigen complexes.
- They compared to dyMEAN and DiffAB looking at amino acid recovery, RMSD and Rosetta InterfaceAnalyzer energy - their model does better on these computational benchmarks.
2025-06-05
Adapting ProteinMPNN for antibody design without retraining
- protein design
- generative methods
- Novel method to bias ProteinMPNN for antibody design, without modifying model weights.
- Logits from protein-general ProteinMPNN and antibody-specific AbLANG are added and softmaxed. Addition of AbLANG is supposed to push the model into the antibody-acceptable space.
- On in-silico experiments ProteinMPNN+AbLang outperformed ProteinMPNN alone and rivalled antibody-specific AbMPNN.
- Authors designed 96 variants of Trastuzumab CDR-H3 using ProteinMPNN, AbLang and ProteinMPNN+AbLang each. AbLANG and ProteinMPNN produced 1 and 3 successful variants respecitively (both out of 96) whereas their combination produced 36 successful variants.
- None of the variants were better variants than WT Trastuzumab.
2025-06-05
AbBFN2: A flexible antibody foundation model based on Bayesian Flow Networks
- developability
- generative methods
- protein design
- Novel generative modeling framework (AbBFN2) using Bayesian Flow Networks (BFNs) for antibody sequence optimization.
- Trains on sequences from Observed Antibody Space (OAS) combined with genetic and biophysical annotations, leveraging a denoising approach for both conditional and unconditional sequence generation. Targets include optimizing Therapeutic Antibody Profiler (TAP) annotations.
- Computationally validated for germline assignment accuracy, species prediction (humanness), and TAP parameter optimization.
- Combines multiple antibody design objectives into a unified, single-step optimization process, unlike existing software methods which are typically specialized for individual tasks.
2025-04-28
Boltzdesign1: Inverting All-Atom Structure Prediction Model for Generalized Biomolecular Binder Design
- non-antibody stuff
- protein design
- Protein design method based on Boltz-1.
- Boltz-1 is an open-source reproduction of AlphaFold3, which uses a diffusion module to co-fold molecular structures (proteins, ligands, etc.).
- For design purposes, BoltzDesign1 sidesteps the full structure generation step and instead uses only the Pairformer (which outputs a distogram — a probabilistic representation of all pairwise residue distances). This allows broader exploration of sequence space, as it optimizes over the distribution of possible structures rather than committing to a single conformation.
- Given a target (such as a small molecule or protein), they weakly initialize a binder sequence using random logits. This sequence is then iteratively refined by backpropagating loss through the Pairformer (and optionally through the Confidence module) to increase the predicted quality of the binder–target interaction.
- A full 3D structure can be generated at the end using the Boltz-1 structure module, but this is not part of the optimization loop.
- They benchmarked their method in silico on small molecule targets and a set of protein–protein interactions from the BindCraft benchmark, comparing performance to RfDiffusion All-Atom.
- BindCraft is an easy-to-use pipeline for computational protein binder design.
- It employs AlphaFold2-Multimer to hallucinate binders via backpropagation.
- Given a target structure and binder parameters (e.g., sequence length), the binder sequence is initialized with random logits and iteratively optimized via gradient descent through the AF2-Multimer network.
- After binder hallucination, the sequence and surface residues are further optimized using MPNNsol, and AF2-Monomer is used to repredict and filter high-confidence designs.
- Binder designs were validated experimentally through in vitro assays, X-ray crystallography, and cryo-EM.
- Reported success rates ranged from 25% to 100%, with most binders in the nanomolar affinity range, a few in the micromolar range, and backbone RMSDs of ~1.7 Å to 3.1 Å between design models and solved structures.
2025-04-28
Atom level enzyme active site scaffolding using RFdiffusion2
- protein design
- non-antibody stuff
- Improvement upon earlier RFDiffusion, enhancing stability and accuracy in designing enzyme active sites.
- Catalytic sites can now be specified at the atomic level instead of the residue backbone level used previously. This eliminates the need to explicitly enumerate side-chain rotamers.
- Training uses flow matching, a technique that simplifies and stabilizes the diffusion training process.
- Benchmarked on a set of 41 diverse enzyme active sites; RFdiffusion2 succeeded in all 41 cases, significantly outperforming the earlier RFDiffusion, which succeeded in only 16.
2025-04-28
Scaling unlocks broader generation and deeper functional understanding of proteins
- protein design
- non-antibody stuff
- Novel protein generative language model — ProGen3
- The model can do autoregressive generation N-to-C, C-to-N, and also supports span infilling.
- The architecture is a Transformer with a Sparse Mixture of Experts (MoE), activating about 27% of parameters per forward pass to improve computational efficiency.
- They studied how sampling affects training by trying different family-level weighting schemes. Uniform sampling across families (where small and large families have equal chance) gave better diversity and generalization, while unmodified sampling (letting big families dominate) performed worst.
- They validated the models by showing that generated proteins express well in wet lab experiments (split-GFP assays, spanning both highly novel and moderately novel sequence spaces).
- They used a large thermostability dataset to align model predictions to stability. This alignment is not standard fine-tuning — instead, preference optimization was applied, teaching the model to prefer sequences predicted to have higher stability. Upon experimental validation, aligned models indeed produced proteins with higher expression and stability.
2025-03-31
Precise, Specific, and Sensitive De Novo Antibody Design Across Multiple Cases
- protein design
- Benchmarking of a proprietary antibody design algorithm.
- The method generates novel antibodies against a target, for a specific epitopic constraint & can be used to re-design antibodies.
- Altogether they find good affinity scfv binders for six targets for which they found a complex in the PDB, like PD1 and Her2.
- The de novo antibody design methods were computationally benchmarked against a curated set of 32 experimentally resolved antibody–antigen complexes using metrics like the G-pass rate and orientation recovery (measured by Fw RMSD). This allowed the authors to compare their method (across different versions) against other approaches.
- They compare against RFAntibody and dyMEAN but in the computational tasks - reproducing the orientation of an existing antibody.
- Several rounds of biopanning are employed to enrich for high-affinity, target-specific binders from a pre-designed library and do not involve the introduction of new mutations.
- They benchmark the developability properties such as monomericity, yield and polyreactivity to show that their antibodies have good properties.
- They demonstrate that most of their designed binders have less than 50% H3 sequence identity to antibodies in the PDB.
- Computational details and binders are not given.
2025-03-21
NanoDesigner: Resolving the complex–CDR interdependency with iterative refinement
- protein design
- nanobodies
- Novel pipeline for computational protein design of nanobodies
- Several tools are collated and adjusted to nanobody case - IgFold for structure prediction, HDOCK for docking and ABDESIGN, DiffAb and dyMEAN for backbone/sequence prediction.
- They chiefly perform computational validation showing the performance on the RMSD/DockQ (re-docking) and the amino acid recovery. Results indicate that focusing on nanobodies provides benefit.
- The entire pipeline can be used for de novo design and optimization.