bioRxiv Science⌕ Search

Biology subjects

Zadorozhny, K.

Publications and source records attributed to Zadorozhny, K..

2 recordsLinked to original sources

CDR Conformation Aware Antibody Sequence Design with ConformAb

Antibody lead optimization methods seek to enhance a lead candidates therapeutic properties through targeted sequence mutation. However, the mutations introduced during this process can inadvertently induce structural changes that disrupt binding, particularly by altering CDR loop conformations which destabilize CDR-target binding interactions. To address this, we present ConformAb, a guided discrete diffusion model for designing antibody sequences that explicitly conform to the CDR canonical conformation of the lead. With seed sequences as the starting point, we show that our method is capable of generating 3- 5x better binders that conform to the same CDR backbone structure in a one-shot design setup, and in some cases, binders with better affinity than seed repertoire picks without any target-specific data included in training. Across the targets tested, ConformAb demonstrated binding rates ranging from 15 -60% in wet lab experiments, a result obtained using fewer than 100 designs for each target. ConformAb offers a unique one-shot approach for antibody lead optimization in data-scarce scenarios where experimental/repertoire data cannot be leveraged for model training.

biophysics↗

Property Enhancer - a data efficient multi-objective approach for functional antibody optimization

In-silico antibody lead optimization remains challenging due to scarce high-quality data, costly experimental validation, and the need to jointly optimize multiple developability properties. Discovery workflows often rely on high-throughput phage, ribosome or yeast display experiments, which yield large but noisy datasets; as leads emerge, strategies shift to low-throughput assays which are precise, yet unscalable. Deep-learning and language-model approaches are hindered by such limited, unreliable measurements. We introduce Property Enhancer (PropEn), a data-efficient framework for low-data, heterogeneous regimes that can simultaneously optimize multiple antibody properties. PropEn proposes a matching-based augmentation that expands the training data with sequence pairs differing by only a few mutations; within each pair the second sequence improves the target value, providing an implicit optimization signal. Extensive in silico and in vitro tests show 10-39x affinity gains across four targets and nine leads, and enable joint multi-property optimization, positioning PropEn as a scalable, general solution.

molecular biology↗