Tag: antibodies
What will be the first AI-designed drug? These disease-fighting antibodies are top contenders
Antibodies — immune proteins that recognize foreign molecules, such as those made by pathogens, with exquisite specificity — have been a challenge for AI to design. AI models such as AlphaFold have struggled to predict the shape of flexible loop regions of antibodies, which they use to recognize their targets.But new tools developed in the past year — including an updated version of AlphaFold — have proved better at modelling these flexible regions, says Gabriele Corso, a machine-learning scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge. Progress in antibody design has followed.
In October, Corso and his colleagues described the BoltzGen model in a preprint, showing that it can adroitly design ‘nanobodies’ — small, simple antibodies resembling molecules made by sharks and camels — against proteins implicated in cancer, viral and bacterial infections and other diseases. In most cases, the researchers identified antibodies with strong target binding after expressing just 15 of the most-promising designs in cells and testing them in laboratory experiments. However, the molecules were not tested in disease models. Learn more
‘A landmark moment’: scientists use AI to design antibodies from scratch
Researchers have used generative artificial intelligence (AI) to help them make completely new antibodies for the first time.The proof-of-principle work, reported this week in a preprint on bioRxiv, raises the possibility of bringing AI-guided protein design to the therapeutic antibody market, which is worth hundreds of billions of dollars.
Antibodies — immune molecules that strongly attach to proteins implicated in disease — have conventionally been made using brute-force approaches that involve immunizing animals or screening vast numbers of molecules.
AI tools that can shortcut those costly efforts have the potential to “democratize the ability to design antibodies”, says study co-author Nathaniel Bennett, a computational biochemist at the University of Washington in Seattle. “Ten years from now, this is how we’re going to be designing antibodies.”
“It’s a really promising piece of research” that represents an important step in applying AI protein-design tools to making new antibodies, says Charlotte Deane, an immuno-informatician at the University of Oxford, UK. Learn more
