BetterBodies: Reinforcement Learning guided Diffusion for Antibody Sequence Design
Antibodies offer great potential for the treatment of various diseases. However, the discovery of therapeutic antibodies through traditional wet lab methods is expensive and time-consuming. The use of generative models in designing antibodies therefore holds great promise, as it can reduce the time and resources required. Recently, the class of diffusion models has gained considerable traction for their ability to synthesize diverse and high-quality samples. In their basic form, however, they lack mechanisms to optimize for specific properties, such as binding affinity to an antigen. In contrast, the class of offline Reinforcement Learning (RL) methods has demonstrated strong performance in navigating large search spaces, including scenarios where frequent real-world interaction, such as interaction with a wet lab, is impractical. Our novel method, BetterBodies, which combines Variational Autoencoders (VAEs) with RL guided latent diffusion, is able to generate novel sets of antibody CDRH3 sequences from different data distributions. Using the Absolut! simulator, we demonstrate the improved affinity of our novel sequences to the SARS-CoV spike receptor-binding domain. Furthermore, we reflect biophysical properties in the VAE latent space using a contrastive loss and add a novel Q-function based filtering to enhance the affinity of generated sequences. In conclusion, methods such as ours have the potential to have great implications for real-world biological sequence design, where the generation of novel high-affinity binders is a cost-intensive endeavor.
Code (0)
등록된 구현이 없습니다.
Tasks
reinforcement-learningReinforcement LearningReinforcement Learning (RL)Methods 이 논문이 사용한 방법론
Similar Papers 제목 키워드 기반
AntiBARTy Diffusion for Property Guided Antibody Design
Over the past decade, antibodies have steadily grown in therapeutic importance thanks to their high specificity and low risk of adverse effects compared to other drug modalities. While traditional antibody discovery is p…
DiversityLanguage ModelingLanguage ModellingSpecificityConditional generation of antibody sequences with classifier-guided germline-absorbing discrete diffusion
Antibody therapeutics are among the most successful modern medicines, yet computationally designing antibodies with desirable binding and developability properties remains challenging. While protein language models (pLMs…
Guided Sequence-Structure Generative Modeling for Iterative Antibody Optimization
Therapeutic antibody candidates often require extensive engineering to improve key functional and developability properties before clinical development. This can be achieved through iterative design, where starting molec…
Guided Generation for Developable Antibodies
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 `developa…
Improving Antibody Design with Force-Guided Sampling in Diffusion Models
Antibodies, crucial for immune defense, primarily rely on complementarity-determining regions (CDRs) to bind and neutralize antigens, such as viruses. The design of these CDRs determines the antibody's affinity and speci…
DenoisingSpecificity