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Main Authors: Xin, Jiayi, Raghu, Aniruddh, Bhattacharya, Nick, Carr, Adam, Montgomery, Melanie, Elliott, Hunter
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.19604
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author Xin, Jiayi
Raghu, Aniruddh
Bhattacharya, Nick
Carr, Adam
Montgomery, Melanie
Elliott, Hunter
author_facet Xin, Jiayi
Raghu, Aniruddh
Bhattacharya, Nick
Carr, Adam
Montgomery, Melanie
Elliott, Hunter
contents Modern therapeutic antibody design often involves composing multi-part assemblages of individual functional domains, each of which may be derived from a different source or engineered independently. While these complex formats can expand disease applicability and improve safety, they present a significant engineering challenge: the function and stability of individual domains are not guaranteed in the novel format, and the entire molecule may no longer be synthesizable. To address these challenges, we develop a machine learning framework to predict "reformatting success" -- whether converting an antibody from one format to another will succeed or not. Our framework incorporates both antibody sequence and structural context, incorporating an evaluation protocol that reflects realistic deployment scenarios. In experiments on a real-world antibody reformatting dataset, we find the surprising result that large pretrained protein language models (PLMs) fail to outperform simple, domain-tailored, multimodal representations. This is particularly evident in the most difficult evaluation setting, where we test model generalization to a new starting antibody. In this challenging "new antibody, no data" scenario, our best multimodal model achieves high predictive accuracy, enabling prioritization of promising candidates and reducing wasted experimental effort.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2509_19604
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Improved Therapeutic Antibody Reformatting through Multimodal Machine Learning
Xin, Jiayi
Raghu, Aniruddh
Bhattacharya, Nick
Carr, Adam
Montgomery, Melanie
Elliott, Hunter
Machine Learning
Modern therapeutic antibody design often involves composing multi-part assemblages of individual functional domains, each of which may be derived from a different source or engineered independently. While these complex formats can expand disease applicability and improve safety, they present a significant engineering challenge: the function and stability of individual domains are not guaranteed in the novel format, and the entire molecule may no longer be synthesizable. To address these challenges, we develop a machine learning framework to predict "reformatting success" -- whether converting an antibody from one format to another will succeed or not. Our framework incorporates both antibody sequence and structural context, incorporating an evaluation protocol that reflects realistic deployment scenarios. In experiments on a real-world antibody reformatting dataset, we find the surprising result that large pretrained protein language models (PLMs) fail to outperform simple, domain-tailored, multimodal representations. This is particularly evident in the most difficult evaluation setting, where we test model generalization to a new starting antibody. In this challenging "new antibody, no data" scenario, our best multimodal model achieves high predictive accuracy, enabling prioritization of promising candidates and reducing wasted experimental effort.
title Improved Therapeutic Antibody Reformatting through Multimodal Machine Learning
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.19604