AbAffinity: A Large Language Model for Predicting Antibody Binding Affinity against SARS-CoV-2
This work addresses the problem of accurately predicting antibody binding affinity for researchers and developers in the field of antibody design, which is an incremental step in improving existing computational tools.
This paper introduces AbAffinity, a large language model designed to predict the binding affinity of antibodies against target peptides, specifically demonstrated for the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein. The model aims to accurately predict this critical property for antibody design.
Machine learning-based antibody design is emerging as one of the most promising approaches to combat infectious diseases, due to significant advancements in the field of artificial intelligence and an exponential surge in experimental antibody data (in particular related to COVID-19). The ability of an antibody to bind to an antigens (called binding affinity) is one of the the most critical properties in designing neutralizing antibodies. In this study we introduce Ab-Affinity, a new large language model that can accurately predict the binding affinity of antibodies against a target peptide, e.g., the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein. Code and model are available at https://github.com/ucrbioinfo/AbAffinity.