A blinded, prospective benchmark of in silico antibody discovery anchored to experimental affinity and developability.
Abstract
Experimentally validated prospective, blinded benchmarks are needed to separate durable advances from hype in computational antibody design. Here AIntibody, a challenge inspired by the Critical Assessment of Structure Prediction, tests 511 artificial intelligence (AI)-designed or predicted antibodies from 29 organizations on three tasks: in silico affinity maturation from phase 1 sequencing outputs, affinity ranking within heavy-chain complementarity-determining region 3 (HCDR3) clusters of a selection output and CDR design of proteins not included in a selection output. Validated with diverse experimental assays, several groups produced developable antibodies with affinities <100 pM. However, these successes were exceptions that did not transfer across tasks. Affinity-matured antibodies were modeled effectively. Except for one model, predicting high-affinity clones from clustered HCDR3 datasets was worse than random clone picking. Out-of-library design was highly variable for most method submissions, with many failing to outperform standard selections. The AIntibody challenge shows that AI can optimize antibodies in defined, biologically grounded regimes, in addition to highlighting critical gaps including affinity prediction and library-inspired antibody design and cross-task generalization.