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Context-aware Multi-Property Antibody Predictor: a Novel Framework Integrating Text and Protein Language Models

Giancardo, L.; Yilmaz, M.; Lee, E.; Ren, K.; Zhao, Y.; Trang, G.; Sonmez, K.; Cheng, N.

2026-01-08 bioinformatics
10.64898/2026.01.07.698270 bioRxiv
Show abstract

Recent advances in Machine Learning have transformed antibody development through in-silico models, accelerating therapeutic candidate identification. However, challenges persist: rapid adaptation of property predictors to laboratory-specific assays with incomplete datasets; batch effects introducing systematic bias; assay costs necessitating efficient unseen property prediction. We introduce a novel multi-modal architecture featuring specialized tokenization and embedding projection that integrates text and protein language models (pLM) and a learning strategy to enable in-context learning for multi-property prediction without learning shortcuts. Our framework enables prompting without dictionary merging across modalities, creating a compact model capable of in-context learning for multi-property prediction. The orchestrating model avoids pLM-to-text projection while enabling inference-time adaptation without retraining. Using 876,898 antibodies with batch effect simulation, our architecture achieved Spearmans {rho}>0.8 across multiple developability properties, significantly outperforming fine-tuned multimodal-LLMs and showed the ability of leveraging correlation between properties for prediction. This approach has the potential to address critical antibody development challenges.

Published in npj Systems Biology and Applications (predicted rank #23) · training set

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