I was invited to speak at the Antibody Engineering and Therapeutics Conference (presenting mine and Matt’s recently published epitope profiling paper), in San Diego (December 12th – 16th). Unfortunately, the pandemic had other ideas so I decided not to travel but luckily the conference was hybrid.
The conference included 1 day of pre-conference workshops and 4 days of presentations from academic and industry, with livestreaming of the initial keynotes (including one from Charlotte). Remaining talks were recorded and made available after the conference. I’ve highlighted a few of my favourite talks and conference themes, with links to papers where available.
Naturally, a lot of the presented research related to covid-19. I was speaking in the ‘Antibody Repertoires and Covid-19’ session, where there were interesting presentations from Professor Eline Luning Prak from the University of Pennsylvania and Elaine Chen from Vanderbilt University analysing antibody responses in covid-recovered individuals, and comparing vaccine responses in covid-recovered vs covid-naiive individuals. Other talks around SARS-CoV-2 vaccines included Dr Laura Walker from Adimab/Adagio Therapeutics comparing BCR repertoire responses to different types of vaccinations, and the effect of using different booster types.
The use of ML/DL for improved antibody library design for therapeutic discovery was also a big area of the conference. Professor Philip M Kim from Toronto University and Professor Possu Huang from Stanford University described approaches to generate antibody sequences with favourable characteristics using graph neural networks, transformers and variational autoencoders. A number of speakers from industry talked about using neural network approaches combined with rapid wet-lab pipelines to quickly synthesise and characterise antibody libraries, and feedback this information into the next round of library design to optimise many parameters at once (such as solubility, binding affinity, aggregation).
Other interesting areas of research included methods for affinity maturation, cancer immunotherapies, T cells and CAR-T therapies, single domain antibodies and targeted drug conjugates.
I thought this was a really nice conference (though would have been nicer if I was in California…) with a good balance of speakers from academia and industry. The European Antibody Engineering and Therapeutics Conference 2022 takes place in Amsterdam (and hybrid) 7 – 9 June, 2022.
