AAVGen: Precision Engineering of Adeno-associated Viral Capsids for Renal Selective Targeting
This work addresses the problem of precise and efficient AAV vector engineering for renal targeting in gene therapy, representing a novel method for a known bottleneck.
The researchers tackled the challenge of engineering adeno-associated viral (AAV) capsids for improved gene therapy by developing AAVGen, a generative AI framework that designs novel capsid sequences with enhanced multi-trait profiles, resulting in a diverse library of variants that show superior performance in production fitness, kidney tropism, and thermostability in in silico validations.
Adeno-associated viruses (AAVs) are promising vectors for gene therapy, but their native serotypes face limitations in tissue tropism, immune evasion, and production efficiency. Engineering capsids to overcome these hurdles is challenging due to the vast sequence space and the difficulty of simultaneously optimizing multiple functional properties. The complexity also adds when it comes to the kidney, which presents unique anatomical barriers and cellular targets that require precise and efficient vector engineering. Here, we present AAVGen, a generative artificial intelligence framework for de novo design of AAV capsids with enhanced multi-trait profiles. AAVGen integrates a protein language model (PLM) with supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and a reinforcement learning technique termed Group Sequence Policy Optimization (GSPO). The model is guided by a composite reward signal derived from three ESM-2-based regression predictors, each trained to predict a key property: production fitness, kidney tropism, and thermostability. Our results demonstrate that AAVGen produces a diverse library of novel VP1 protein sequences. In silico validations revealed that the majority of the generated variants have superior performance across all three employed indices, indicating successful multi-objective optimization. Furthermore, structural analysis via AlphaFold3 confirms that the generated sequences preserve the canonical capsid folding despite sequence diversification. AAVGen establishes a foundation for data-driven viral vector engineering, accelerating the development of next-generation AAV vectors with tailored functional characteristics.