BioExcel Webinar #57: Computationally designing therapeutic antibodies – combining immune repertoire data and structural information

In this talk I will give an overview of the databases and tools built within my group to exploit the sequence and structure data available for antibodies to build a better understanding of the immune system and aid in the development of biotherapeutics. Our focus is to move from a sequence based view of the system that is common in the area of immunoinformatics to a structure based one.

To this end we have built the structural antibody database (SAbDab) and the computational antibody prediction toolset SAbPred for modelling and designing antibodies. These tools are then used to enrich the available sequence data in our Observed Antibody Space (OAS) a database of nearly two billion antibody sequences, Thera-SAbDab, a collection of all antibody and nanobody-related therapeutics recognized by the World Health Organisation and most recently CoV-AbDab, an annotated database of all known antibody and nanobody binders to betacoronoviruses.

I will describe how bringing together the huge availability of sequence data alongside structural data and prediction tools has allowed us to develop insights into the natural immune repertoire, response of the repertoire to vaccines and the development of antibody therapeutics.