Toward generalizable prediction of antibody thermostability using machine learning on sequence and structure features

作者：Ameya Harmalkar, Roshan Rao, Yuxuan Richard Xie, Jonas Honer, Wibke Deisting, Jonas Anlahr, Anja Hoenig, Julia Czwikla, Eva Sienz-Widmann, Doris Rau, Austin J. Rice, Timothy P. Riley, Danqing Li, Hannah B. Catterall, Christine E. Tinberg, Jeffrey J. Gray, Kathy Y. Wei · 发表于：mAbs · 年份：2023 · DOI：10.1080/19420862.2022.2163584 · 被引用次数：50 · 研究领域：Monoclonal and Polyclonal Antibodies Research、Protein purification and stability、RNA and protein synthesis mechanisms

Over the last three decades, the appeal for monoclonal antibodies (mAbs) as therapeutics has been steadily increasing as evident with FDA’s recent landmark approval of the 100th mAb. Unlike mAbs that bind to single targets, multispecific biologics (msAbs) have garnered particular interest owing to the advantage of engaging distinct targets. One important modular component of msAbs is the single-chain variable fragment (scFv). Despite the exquisite specificity and affinity of these scFv modules, their relatively poor thermostability often hampers their development as a potential therapeutic drug. In recent years, engineering antibody sequences to enhance their stability by mutations has gained considerable momentum. As experimental methods for antibody engineering are time-intensive, laborious and expensive, computational methods serve as a fast and inexpensive alternative to conventional routes. In this work, we show two machine learning approaches – one with pre-trained language models (PTLM) capturing functional effects of sequence variation, and second, a supervised convolutional neural network (CNN) trained with Rosetta energetic features – to better classify thermostable scFv variants from sequence. Both of these models are trained over temperature-specific data (TS50 measurements) derived from multiple libraries of scFv sequences. On out-of-distribution (refers to the fact that the out-of-distribution sequnes are blind to the algorithm) sequences, we show that a suffici...