Back

Computational nanobody design using graph neural networks and Metropolis Monte Carlo sampling

Wang, L.; He, X.; Guo, G.; Qian, X.; Huang, Q.

2025-06-08 bioinformatics
10.1101/2025.06.08.658414 bioRxiv
Show abstract

Nanobodies have emerged as promising protein therapeutics due to their high-stability, low immunogenicity, and ease of production. However, experimental screening of high-affinity nanobodies for specific antigens and their post optimization remain costly and time-consuming, mainly due to the large number of possible variants. Here, we developed a computational approach that integrates graph neural networks (GNNs) with Monte Carlo Metropolis algorithm for nanobody design. We constructed a GNN model, AiPPA, to predict the protein-protein binding free energy (BFE) without requiring the complex structure, achieving a Pearson correlation of 0.62 on benchmark. We then combined AiPPA with Metropolis importance sampling to design low-BFE nanobodies from a non-affinity template. We applied this method to the antigen TL1A, and generated two affinity nanobodies. This work establishes a physics-informed deep learning method for computational nanobody design, providing a novel development strategy for protein therapeutics.

Published in Briefings in Bioinformatics (predicted rank #7) · training set

Matching journals

The top 6 journals account for 50% of the predicted probability mass.

50% of probability mass above

"Similar papers" are the closest papers from that journal in the model's embedding space. They show what the match is built on, but the ranking comes mostly from a classifier over the whole training set, not from these examples alone.