tcrLM: a lightweight protein language model for predicting T cell receptor and epitope binding specificity

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Fang, Xing, Yu, Chenpeng, Tian, Shiye, Liu, Hui
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2024
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author Fang, Xing
Yu, Chenpeng
Tian, Shiye
Liu, Hui
author_facet Fang, Xing
Yu, Chenpeng
Tian, Shiye
Liu, Hui
contents The anti-cancer immune response relies on the bindings between T-cell receptors (TCRs) and antigens, which elicits adaptive immunity to eliminate tumor cells. This ability of the immune system to respond to novel various neoantigens arises from the immense diversity of TCR repository. However, TCR diversity poses a significant challenge on accurately predicting antigen-TCR bindings. In this study, we introduce a lightweight masked language model, termed tcrLM, to address this challenge. Our approach involves randomly masking segments of TCR sequences and training tcrLM to infer the masked segments, thereby enabling the extraction of expressive features from TCR sequences. To further enhance robustness, we incorporate virtual adversarial training into tcrLM. We construct the largest TCR CDR3 sequence set with more than 100 million distinct sequences, and pretrain tcrLM on these sequences. The pre-trained encoder is subsequently applied to predict TCR-antigen binding specificity. We evaluate model performance on three test datasets: independent, external, and COVID-19 test set. The results demonstrate that tcrLM not only surpasses existing TCR-antigen binding prediction methods, but also outperforms other mainstream protein language models. More interestingly, tcrLM effectively captures the biochemical properties and positional preference of amino acids within TCR sequences. Additionally, the predicted TCR-neoantigen binding scores indicates the immunotherapy responses and clinical outcomes in a melanoma cohort. These findings demonstrate the potential of tcrLM in predicting TCR-antigen binding specificity, with significant implications for advancing immunotherapy and personalized medicine.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2406_16995
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle tcrLM: a lightweight protein language model for predicting T cell receptor and epitope binding specificity
Fang, Xing
Yu, Chenpeng
Tian, Shiye
Liu, Hui
Quantitative Methods
Artificial Intelligence
The anti-cancer immune response relies on the bindings between T-cell receptors (TCRs) and antigens, which elicits adaptive immunity to eliminate tumor cells. This ability of the immune system to respond to novel various neoantigens arises from the immense diversity of TCR repository. However, TCR diversity poses a significant challenge on accurately predicting antigen-TCR bindings. In this study, we introduce a lightweight masked language model, termed tcrLM, to address this challenge. Our approach involves randomly masking segments of TCR sequences and training tcrLM to infer the masked segments, thereby enabling the extraction of expressive features from TCR sequences. To further enhance robustness, we incorporate virtual adversarial training into tcrLM. We construct the largest TCR CDR3 sequence set with more than 100 million distinct sequences, and pretrain tcrLM on these sequences. The pre-trained encoder is subsequently applied to predict TCR-antigen binding specificity. We evaluate model performance on three test datasets: independent, external, and COVID-19 test set. The results demonstrate that tcrLM not only surpasses existing TCR-antigen binding prediction methods, but also outperforms other mainstream protein language models. More interestingly, tcrLM effectively captures the biochemical properties and positional preference of amino acids within TCR sequences. Additionally, the predicted TCR-neoantigen binding scores indicates the immunotherapy responses and clinical outcomes in a melanoma cohort. These findings demonstrate the potential of tcrLM in predicting TCR-antigen binding specificity, with significant implications for advancing immunotherapy and personalized medicine.
title tcrLM: a lightweight protein language model for predicting T cell receptor and epitope binding specificity
topic Quantitative Methods
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.16995