Connecting the sequence dots: shedding light on the genesis of antibodies reported to be designed in silico
Name
Connecting the sequence dots shedding light on the genesis of antibodies reported to be designed in silico.pdf
Description
Published version
Size
2.69 MB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
8cb888ae1ea4a05aa1ab0e2ee0800865
Author(s)
Vásquez, M
Krauland, E
Walker, L
Wittrup, D
Gerngross, T
Date Issued
July 4, 2019
Journal
mAbs
Publisher
Informa UK Limited
Version
Final published version
Abstract
© 2019, © 2019 The Author(s). Published with license by Taylor & Francis Group, LLC. Two recent publications out of the same research laboratory report on structure-based in silico design of antibodies against viral targets without sequence disclosure. Cross-referencing the published data to patent databases, we established the sequence identity of said computationally designed antibodies. In both cases, the antibodies align with high sequence identity to previously reported antibodies of the same specificity. This clear underlying sequence relationship, which is far closer than the antibody templates reported to seed the computational design, suggests an alternative origin of the computationally designed antibodies. The lack of both reproducible computational algorithms and of output sequences in the initial publications obscures the relationship to previously reported antibodies, and sows doubt as to the genesis narrative described therein.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Biological Engineering
Terms of Use
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License
Persistent DSpace Link
DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1080/19420862.2019.1611172
