Schilz, J. | bioRxiv Science

bioRxiv2026

MIMOSA: Guiding De Novo Antibody Design with Natural Interaction Fingerprints

De novo antibody design promises to transform therapeutic antibody and nanobody discovery. Yet, success remains inconsistent across targets, with generative models often yielding no experimentally validated binders. Here we introduce MIMOSA (MIMic-Oriented Structural Antibody generation), a model-agnostic, inference-time framework that constrains diffusion-based antibody design pipelines to reproduce the interaction geometry and chemistry of a target's known cognate binder interface. Rather than searching for a productive interface from scratch, MIMOSA constrains generation around residue identities and geometries already known to support binding, while allowing the generative model to complete the surrounding antibody interface. We test MIMOSA on different interface topologies: contiguous motifs that fit within a single CDR loop and spatially dispersed hotspots distributed across the paratope. Applied without retraining to two architecturally distinct generators (RFAntibody and BoltzGen), this framework delivers experimentally validated binders-achieving sub-micromolar to single-digit nanomolar affinities-at 20-26% hit rates on three targets on which unconstrained methods produce zero or near-zero binders: KEAP1, uPA, and IL-8. By turning any target with a structurally characterised cognate binder into an accessible de novo design problem, this framework broadens the practical reach of generative antibody design to targets where unconstrained approaches currently fail.

bioinformatics↗

bioRxiv2019

Antibody Complementarity Determining Region Design Using High-Capacity Machine Learning

The precise targeting of antibodies and other protein therapeutics is required for their proper function and the elimination of deleterious off-target effects. Often the molecular structure of a therapeutic target is unknown and randomized methods are used to design antibodies without a model that relates antibody sequence to desired properties. Here we present a machine learning method that can design human Immunoglobulin G (IgG) antibodies with target affinities that are superior to candidates from phage display panning experiments within a limited design budget. We also demonstrate that machine learning can improve target-specificity by the modular composition of models from different experimental campaigns, enabling a new integrative approach to improving target specificity. Our results suggest a new path for the discovery of therapeutic molecules by demonstrating that predictive and differentiable models of antibody binding can be learned from high-throughput experimental data without the need for target structural data.\n\nSignificanceAntibody based therapeutics must meet both affinity and specificity metrics, and existing in vitro methods for meeting these metrics are based upon randomization and empirical testing. We demonstrate that with sufficient target-specific training data machine learning can suggest novel antibody variable domain sequences that are superior to those observed during training. Our machine learning method does not require any target structural information. We further show that data from disparate antibody campaigns can be combined by machine learning to improve antibody specificity.

immunology↗