Between the 27th April and 1st of May, I was very fortunate to be able attend the Antibodies as Drugs Keystone Symposium and give my first conference talk internationally, in which I spoke about the methods our group has developed for using structure to make predictions about where an antibody binds relative to other antibodies. This included paratyping [1], Ab-Ligity [2] and most recently SPACE [3].

I will preface this by saying that lots of the work people spoke about was unpublished, which was so exciting, but makes for a difficult blog post to write. To avoid any possibility of putting my foot in my mouth I will keep the science very surface level. The conference was held at the Keystone resort in Colorado, and the science combined with a kind of landscape I have never experienced before made for an extremely cool experience. This meeting was originally combined with a protein design meeting, and the two were split by COVID – this meant that in-silico methods were the minority in the program, but I didn’t mind that as the computational work that was presented was quite diverse so it was definitely a good representation of the field still. I also really enjoyed the large number of infectious disease talks in which we got a good range of the major human pathogens – ebolaviruses, SARS-CoV-2 of course, dengue, hantaviruses, metapneumovirus, HIV, TB and malaria all featured. The bispecific session was another highlight for me. The conference was very well organised and I liked how we were all asked to share a fun fact about ourselves – one speaker shared that he is a Christmas tree farmer in his spare time (I won’t share his name in case he is keeping that under wraps). That made me reconsider how fun I can truly consider myself…

Without turning this into a travel blog, I also want to add that Keystone was insanely beautiful and make you look at some pics I got. 

Thank you to the conference organisers and to Charlotte for allowing me to attend and present at such a fantastic meeting.

[1] Richardson, Eve, et al. “A computational method for immune repertoire mining that identifies novel binders from different clonotypes, demonstrated by identifying anti-pertussis toxoid antibodies.” MAbs. Vol. 13. No. 1. Taylor & Francis, 2021.

[2] Wong, Wing Ki, et al. “Ab-Ligity: identifying sequence-dissimilar antibodies that bind to the same epitope.” MAbs. Vol. 13. No. 1. Taylor & Francis, 2021.

[3] Robinson, Sarah A., et al. “Epitope profiling using computational structural modelling demonstrated on coronavirus-binding antibodies.” PLoS computational biology17.12 (2021): e1009675.