I recently spoke at the Festival of Biologics 2021 conference in Basel (in-person, just in time!), and was lucky enough to be offered the chance to chair a session of talks. As this was the first time I’d ever been asked to do this, I asked Charlotte for some hints to make things go more smoothly. I found her advice very useful, so I thought I’d share it here for other first-time “chairers”!
Continue readingAuthor Archives: Matthew Raybould
New review on BCR/antibody repertoire analysis out in MAbs!
In our latest immunoinformatics review, OPIG has teamed up with experienced antibody consultant Dr. Anthony Rees to outline the evidence for BCR/antibody repertoire convergence on common epitopes post-pathogen exposure, and all the ways we can go about detecting it from repertoire gene sequencing data. We highlight the new advances in the repertoire functional analysis field, including the role for OPIG’s latest tools for structure-aware antibody analytics: Structural Annotation of AntiBody repertoires+ (SAAB+), Paratyping, Ab-Ligity, Repertoire Structural Profiling & Structural Profiling of Antibodies to Cluster by Epitope (‘SPACE’).
Continue reading2021 likely to be a bumper year for therapeutic antibodies entering clinical trials; massive increase in new targets
Earlier this month the World Health Organisation (WHO) released Proposed International Nonproprietary Name List 125 (PL125), comprising the therapeutics entering clinical trials during the first half of 2021. We have just added this data to our Therapeutic Structural Antibody Database (Thera-SAbDab), bringing the total number of therapeutic antibodies recognised by the WHO to 711.
This is up from 651 at the end of 2020, a year which saw 89 new therapeutic antibodies introduced to the clinic. This rise of 60 in just the first half of 2021 bodes well for a record-breaking year of therapeutics entering trials.
Continue readingThe Coronavirus Antibody Database: 10 months on, 10x the data!
Back in May 2020, we released the Coronavirus Antibody Database (‘CoV-AbDab’) to capture molecular information on existing coronavirus-binding antibodies, and to track what we anticipated would be a boon of data on antibodies able to bind SARS-CoV-2. At the time, we had found around 300 relevant antibody sequences and a handful of solved crystal structures, most of which were characterised shortly after the SARS-CoV epidemic of 2003. We had no idea just how many SARS-CoV-2 binding antibody sequences would come to be released into the public domain…
10 months later (2nd March 2021), we now have tracked 2,673 coronavirus-binding antibodies, ~95% with full Fv sequence information and ~5% with solved structures. These datapoints originate from 100s of independent studies reported in either the academic literature or patent filings.
BioDataScience101: a fantastic initiative to learn bioinformatics and data science
Last Wednesday, I was fortunate enough to be invited as a guest lecturer to the 3rd BioDataScience101 workshop, an initiative spearheaded by Paolo Marcatili, Professor of Bioinformatics at the Technical University of Denmark (DTU). This session, on amino acid sequence analysis applied to both proteomics and antibody drug discovery, was designed and organised by OPIG’s very own Tobias Olsen.
Continue readingWhat can you do with the OPIG Antibody Suite? v2.0
Since my last blogpost on this topic back in 2018, OPIG has expanded its range of tools for antibody/BCR analysis. Here is an updated summary of the OPIG antibody databases and immunoinformatics tools.
Continue readingPrerecording Conference Talks and Posters using OBS Studio
Seemingly every conference due to take place this year has either been cancelled or will be run virtually due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Many organisers have decided that running entirely live virtual programmes causes more trouble than it’s worth (e.g. due to unforseeable IT and internet issues disrupting the schedule), and so are asking their presenters to prerecord their talks, which are then broadcast “live” on the day.
I recently “presented” two virtual prerecorded talks at the ISMB conference using Open Broadcast Software Studio (OBS Studio), a free open-source software package most commonly used by live-streamers on Twitch and Youtube. It is super simple to use and achieves a professional output, with video overlaying a presentation slide deck/poster PDF. This blog is a “how-to” on getting started with OBS for conference talks/poster presentations.
Continue readingWhere do OPIGlets come from?
Now you might think the answer to this question is OSOWs, but in fact they come from a wide variety of Undergraduate degrees!
The Coronavirus Antibody Database (CoV-AbDab)
We are happy to announce the release of CoV-AbDab, our database tracking all coronavirus binding antibodies and nanobodies with molecular-level metadata. The database can be searched and downloaded here: http://opig.stats.ox.ac.uk/webapps/coronavirus
Continue readingB-Cell Bispecificity?!
Happy New Year, Blopiggers!
Just a quick one from me this time around, to draw your attention to this intriguing paper by Shi et al., published in Nature Cell Discovery late last year.
“More than one antibody of individual B cells revealed by single-cell immune profiling“
Zhan Shi, Qingyang Zhang, Huige Yan, et al.
Nature Cell Discovery (2019) 5:64
Single-cell transcriptomics (e.g. using TenX sequencing) is beginning to yield fascinating insights into the inner workings of our immune system. It has long been thought that a single B cell can only express one antibody variable domain on its surface, accounted for by theories such as allelic exclusion and isotype exclusion.
Continue reading