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 antibody design


FP-AbDiff: Improving Score-based Antibody Design by Capturing Nonequilibrium Dynamics through the Underlying Fokker-Planck Equation

Chen, Jiameng, Xiong, Yida, Li, Kun, Zhang, Hongzhi, Cai, Xiantao, Hu, Wenbin, Wu, Jia

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Computational antibody design holds immense promise for therapeutic discovery, yet existing generative models are fundamentally limited by two core challenges: (i) a lack of dynamical consistency, which yields physically implausible structures, and (ii) poor generalization due to data scarcity and structural bias. We introduce FP-AbDiff, the first antibody generator to enforce Fokker-Planck Equation (FPE) physics along the entire generative trajectory. Our method minimizes a novel FPE residual loss over the mixed manifold of CDR geometries (R^3 x SO(3)), compelling locally-learned denoising scores to assemble into a globally coherent probability flow. This physics-informed regularizer is synergistically integrated with deep biological priors within a state-of-the-art SE(3)-equivariant diffusion framework. Rigorous evaluation on the RAbD benchmark confirms that FP-AbDiff establishes a new state-of-the-art. In de novo CDR-H3 design, it achieves a mean Root Mean Square Deviation of 0.99 Å when superposing on the variable region, a 25% improvement over the previous state-of-the-art model, AbX, and the highest reported Contact Amino Acid Recovery of 39.91%. This superiority is underscored in the more challenging six-CDR co-design task, where our model delivers consistently superior geometric precision, cutting the average full-chain Root Mean Square Deviation by ~15%, and crucially, achieves the highest full-chain Amino Acid Recovery on the functionally dominant CDR-H3 loop (45.67%). By aligning generative dynamics with physical laws, FP-AbDiff enhances robustness and generalizability, establishing a principled approach for physically faithful and functionally viable antibody design.


Latent Retrieval Augmented Generation of Cross-Domain Protein Binders

Zhang, Zishen, Kong, Xiangzhe, Huang, Wenbing, Liu, Yang

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Designing protein binders targeting specific sites, which requires to generate realistic and functional interaction patterns, is a fundamental challenge in drug discovery. Current structure-based generative models are limited in generating nterfaces with sufficient rationality and interpretability. In this paper, we propose Retrieval-Augmented Diffusion for Aligned interface (RADiAnce), a new framework that leverages known interfaces to guide the design of novel binders. By unifying retrieval and generation in a shared contrastive latent space, our model efficiently identifies relevant interfaces for a given binding site and seamlessly integrates them through a conditional latent diffusion generator, enabling cross-domain interface transfer. Extensive exeriments show that RADiAnce significantly outperforms baseline models across multiple metrics, including binding affinity and recovery of geometries and interactions. Additional experimental results validate cross-domain generalization, demonstrating that retrieving interfaces from diverse domains, such as peptides, antibodies, and protein fragments, enhances the generation performance of binders for other domains. Our work establishes a new paradigm for protein binder design that successfully bridges retrieval-based knowledge and generative AI, opening new possibilities for drug discovery.


AbBiBench: A Benchmark for Antibody Binding Affinity Maturation and Design

Zhao, Xinyan, Tang, Yi-Ching, Singh, Akshita, Cantu, Victor J, An, KwanHo, Lee, Junseok, Stogsdill, Adam E, Hamdi, Ibraheem M, Ramesh, Ashwin Kumar, An, Zhiqiang, Jiang, Xiaoqian, Kim, Yejin

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

We introduce AbBiBench (Antibody Binding Benchmarking), a benchmarking framework for antibody binding affinity maturation and design. Unlike previous strategies that evaluate antibodies in isolation, typically by comparing them to natural sequences with metrics such as amino acid recovery rate or structural RMSD, AbBiBench instead treats the antibody-antigen (Ab-Ag) complex as the fundamental unit. It evaluates an antibody design's binding potential by measuring how well a protein model scores the full Ab-Ag complex. We first curate, standardize, and share more than 184,500 experimental measurements of antibody mutants across 14 antibodies and 9 antigens-including influenza, lysozyme, HER2, VEGF, integrin, Ang2, and SARS-CoV-2-covering both heavy-chain and light-chain mutations. Using these datasets, we systematically compare 15 protein models including masked language models, autoregressive language models, inverse folding models, diffusion-based generative models, and geometric graph models by comparing the correlation between model likelihood and experimental affinity values. Additionally, to demonstrate AbBiBench's generative utility, we apply it to antibody F045-092 in order to introduce binding to influenza H1N1. We sample new antibody variants with the top-performing models, rank them by the structural integrity and biophysical properties of the Ab-Ag complex, and assess them with in vitro ELISA binding assays. Our findings show that structure-conditioned inverse folding models outperform others in both affinity correlation and generation tasks. Overall, AbBiBench provides a unified, biologically grounded evaluation framework to facilitate the development of more effective, function-aware antibody design models.


Antigen-Specific Antibody Design via Direct Energy-based Preference Optimization Xiangxin Zhou

Neural Information Processing Systems

Antibody design, a crucial task with significant implications across various disciplines such as therapeutics and biology, presents considerable challenges due to its intricate nature. In this paper, we tackle antigen-specific antibody sequence-structure co-design as an optimization problem towards specific preferences, considering both rationality and functionality.



Learning from B Cell Evolution: Adaptive Multi-Expert Diffusion for Antibody Design via Online Optimization

Feng, Hanqi, Qiu, Peng, Zhang, Mengchun, Tao, Yiran, Fan, You, Xu, Jingtao, Poczos, Barnabas

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Recent advances in diffusion models have shown remarkable potential for antibody design, yet existing approaches apply uniform generation strategies that cannot adapt to each antigen's unique requirements. Inspired by B cell affinity maturation--where antibodies evolve through multi-objective optimization balancing affinity, stability, and self-avoidance--we propose the first biologically-motivated framework that leverages physics-based domain knowledge within an online meta-learning system. Our method employs multiple specialized experts (van der Waals, molecular recognition, energy balance, and interface geometry) whose parameters evolve during generation based on iterative feedback, mimicking natural antibody refinement cycles. Instead of fixed protocols, this adaptive guidance discovers personalized optimization strategies for each target. Our experiments demonstrate that this approach: (1) discovers optimal SE(3)-equivariant guidance strategies for different antigen classes without pre-training, preserving molecular symmetries throughout optimization; (2) significantly enhances hotspot coverage and interface quality through target-specific adaptation, achieving balanced multi-objective optimization characteristic of therapeutic antibodies; (3) establishes a paradigm for iterative refinement where each antibody-antigen system learns its unique optimization profile through online evaluation; (4) generalizes effectively across diverse design challenges, from small epitopes to large protein interfaces, enabling precision-focused campaigns for individual targets.


Generative Co-Design of Antibody Sequences and Structures via Black-Box Guidance in a Shared Latent Space

Yao, Yinghua, Pan, Yuangang, Chen, Xixian

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Advancements in deep generative models have enabled the joint modeling of antibody sequence and structure, given the antigen-antibody complex as context. However, existing approaches for optimizing complementarity-determining regions (CDRs) to improve developability properties operate in the raw data space, leading to excessively costly evaluations due to the inefficient search process. To address this, we propose LatEnt blAck-box Design (LEAD), a sequence-structure co-design framework that optimizes both sequence and structure within their shared latent space. Optimizing shared latent codes can not only break through the limitations of existing methods, but also ensure synchronization of different modality designs. Particularly, we design a black-box guidance strategy to accommodate real-world scenarios where many property evaluators are non-differentiable. Experimental results demonstrate that our LEAD achieves superior optimization performance for both single and multi-property objectives. Notably, LEAD reduces query consumption by a half while surpassing baseline methods in property optimization. The code is available at https://github.com/EvaFlower/


HelixDesign-Antibody: A Scalable Production-Grade Platform for Antibody Design Built on HelixFold3

Gao, Jie, Hu, Jing, Zhang, Shanzhuo, Zhu, Kunrui, Qian, Sheng, Huang, Yueyang, Zhang, Xiaonan, Fang, Xiaomin

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Antibody engineering is essential for developing therapeutics and advancing biomedical research. Traditional discovery methods often rely on time-consuming and resource-intensive experimental screening. To enhance and streamline this process, we introduce a production-grade, high-throughput platform built on HelixFold3, HelixDesign-Antibody, which utilizes the high-accuracy structure prediction model, HelixFold3. The platform facilitates the large-scale generation of antibody candidate sequences and evaluates their interaction with antigens. Integrated high-performance computing (HPC) support enables high-throughput screening, addressing challenges such as fragmented toolchains and high computational demands. Validation on multiple antigens showcases the platform's ability to generate diverse and high-quality antibodies, confirming a scaling law where exploring larger sequence spaces increases the likelihood of identifying optimal binders. This platform provides a seamless, accessible solution for large-scale antibody design and is available via the antibody design page of PaddleHelix platform.


Guided Generation for Developable Antibodies

Zhao, Siqi, Moller, Joshua, Quintero-Cadena, Porfi, van Niekerk, Lood

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Therapeutic antibodies require not only high-affinity target engagement, but also favorable manufacturability, stability, and safety profiles for clinical effectiveness. These properties are collectively called `developability'. To enable a computational framework for optimizing antibody sequences for favorable developability, we introduce a guided discrete diffusion model trained on natural paired heavy- and light-chain sequences from the Observed Antibody Space (OAS) and quantitative developability measurements for 246 clinical-stage antibodies. To steer generation toward biophysically viable candidates, we integrate a Soft Value-based Decoding in Diffusion (SVDD) Module that biases sampling without compromising naturalness. In unconstrained sampling, our model reproduces global features of both the natural repertoire and approved therapeutics, and under SVDD guidance we achieve significant enrichment in predicted developability scores over unguided baselines. When combined with high-throughput developability assays, this framework enables an iterative, ML-driven pipeline for designing antibodies that satisfy binding and biophysical criteria in tandem.


Antibody Design and Optimization with Multi-scale Equivariant Graph Diffusion Models for Accurate Complex Antigen Binding

Chen, Jiameng, Cai, Xiantao, Wu, Jia, Hu, Wenbin

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Antibody design remains a critical challenge in therapeutic and diagnostic development, particularly for complex antigens with diverse binding interfaces. Current computational methods face two main limitations: (1) capturing geometric features while preserving symmetries, and (2) generalizing novel antigen interfaces. Despite recent advancements, these methods often fail to accurately capture molecular interactions and maintain structural integrity. To address these challenges, we propose \textbf{AbMEGD}, an end-to-end framework integrating \textbf{M}ulti-scale \textbf{E}quivariant \textbf{G}raph \textbf{D}iffusion for antibody sequence and structure co-design. Leveraging advanced geometric deep learning, AbMEGD combines atomic-level geometric features with residue-level embeddings, capturing local atomic details and global sequence-structure interactions. Its E(3)-equivariant diffusion method ensures geometric precision, computational efficiency, and robust generalizability for complex antigens. Furthermore, experiments using the SAbDab database demonstrate a 10.13\% increase in amino acid recovery, 3.32\% rise in improvement percentage, and a 0.062~Å reduction in root mean square deviation within the critical CDR-H3 region compared to DiffAb, a leading antibody design model. These results highlight AbMEGD's ability to balance structural integrity with improved functionality, establishing a new benchmark for sequence-structure co-design and affinity optimization. The code is available at: https://github.com/Patrick221215/AbMEGD.