Unconstrained generation of synthetic antibody-antigen structures to guide machine learning methodology for real-world antibody specificity prediction

Machine learning (ML) is a key technology for accurate prediction of antibody-antigen binding. Two orthogonal problems hinder the application of ML to antibody-specificity prediction and the benchmarking thereof: The lack of a unified ML formalization of immunological antibody specificity prediction problems and the unavailability of large-scale synthetic benchmarking datasets of real-world relevance. Here, we developed the Absolut! software suite that enables parameter-based unconstrained generation of synthetic lattice-based 3D-antibody-antigen binding structures with ground-truth access to conformational paratope, epitope, and affinity. We formalized common immunological antibody specificity prediction problems as ML tasks and confirmed that for both sequence and structure-based tasks, accuracy-based rankings of ML methods trained on experimental data hold for ML methods trained on Absolut!-generated data. The Absolut! framework thus enables real-world relevant development and benchmarking of ML strategies for biotherapeutics design. Graphical abstract O_FIG O_LINKSMALLFIG WIDTH=200 HEIGHT=195 SRC="FIGDIR/small/451258v3_ufig1.gif" ALT="Figure 1"> View larger version (86K): org.highwire.dtl.DTLVardef@4c3a6aorg.highwire.dtl.DTLVardef@8f1deborg.highwire.dtl.DTLVardef@1f55ec6org.highwire.dtl.DTLVardef@2135dd_HPS_FORMAT_FIGEXP M_FIG The software framework Absolut! enables (A,B) the generation of virtually arbitrarily large numbers of synthetic 3D-antibody-antigen structures, (C,D) the formalization of antibody specificity as machine learning (ML) tasks as well as the exploration of ML strategies for real-world antibody-antigen binding or paratope-epitope prediction. C_FIG HighlightsO_LISoftware framework Absolut! to generate an arbitrarily large number of synthetic 3D-antibody-antigen structures that contain biological layers of antibody-antigen binding complexity that render ML predictions challenging C_LIO_LIImmunological antibody specificity prediction problems formalized as machine learning tasks for which the in silico complexes are immediately usable as benchmark datasets C_LIO_LIExploration of machine learning prediction accuracy as a function of architecture, dataset size, choice of negatives, and sequence-structure encoding C_LIO_LIRelative ML performance learnt on Absolut! datasets transfers to experimental datasets C_LI