De novo design of high-affinity single-domain antibodies
crossref(2024)
Abstract
Developing antibodies is complex and resource-intensive, and methods for designing antibodies targeting specific epitopes are lacking. We introduce a de novo antibody design approach leveraging the empirical force field FoldX to design complementarity determining regions (CDRs). Starting from a scaffold VHH, we tackled three challenges of increasing difficulty: 1) design the CDRs to optimize VHH stability and affinity for its original target; 2) design the CDRs for high affinity to the human ortholog; 3) design the CDRs for low nanomolar affinity for a pre-defined epitope on the unrelated human Interleukin-9 receptor alpha, for which no antibodies were previously developed. For each challenge we reached single digit nanomolar affinity in a single design cycle. Our approach allows de novo design of high-affinity VHHs while ensuring specificity and stability.
### Competing Interest Statement
RvdK, JS, FR, LSP, JDB, DC. are co-inventors on E.U. provisional patent number EP 24170283.6 which covers the computational antibody design pipeline described here.
MoreTranslated text
AI Read Science
Must-Reading Tree
Example
Generate MRT to find the research sequence of this paper
Chat Paper
Summary is being generated by the instructions you defined