On the theme of my research area and my last presentation I talked at group meeting about a another success story in structurally designing an antibody by replicating a general protein binding site using grafted fragments involved in the original complex. The paper by Liu et al is important to me for two major reasons . Firstly they used an unconventional antibody for protein design, namely a bovine antibody which is known to have an extended CDR H3. Secondly the fragment was not grafted at the anchor points of the CDR loop.

SFTI-1 is a cyclic peptide and a known trypsin inhibitor. It’s structure is stabilised by a disulphide bridge. The bovine antibody is known to have an extended H3 loop which is essentially a long beta strand stalk with a knob domain at the end. Liu et al removed the knob domain and a portion of the B strand and grafted the acyclic version of the SFTI-1 to it. As I said above this result is very important because it shows we can graft a fragment/loop at places different then the anchor points of the CDR. This opens up the possibility for more diverse fragments to be grafted because of new anchor points,  and also because the fragment will sit further away from the other CDRs and the framework allowing more conformational space. To see how the designed antibody compares to the original peptide they measured the Kd and found a 4 fold increase (9.57 vs 13.3). They hypothesise that this is probably due to the fact that the extended beta strand on the antibody keeps the acyclic SFTI-1 peptide in a more stable conformation.

The problem with the bovine antibody is that if inserted in a human subject it would probably elicit an immune response from the native immune system. To humanise this antibody they found the human framework which shares the greatest sequence identity to the bovine antibody and then grafted the fragment on it. The human antibody does not have an extended CDR H3 and to decide what is the best place of grafting they tried various combinations again showing again that the fragments do not need to grafted exactly at the anchor points. Some of the resulting  human antibodies showed even more impressive Kds.

The best designed human antibody had a 0.79nM Kd, another 10-fold gain . Liu et al hypothesised that this might be due to the fact that the cognate protein forms contacts with residues on the other CDRs even though there is no crystal structure to show this. In order to test this hypothesis they mutated surface residues on the H2 and L1 loop to Alanine which resulted in a 6.7 fold decrease in affinity. The only comment I would have to this is that the mutations to the other CDRs might have destabilized the other CDRs on the antibody which could be the reason for the decrease in affinity.