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, and Victor Greiff
Machine learning-based generation of native-like antibody sequences.
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.
mAbs, 14, 1, 2031482, 2022-04-04.