OPIG’s growing immunoinformatics team continues to develop and openly distribute a wide variety of databases and software packages for antibody/nanobody/T-cell receptor analysis. Below is a summary of all the latest updates (follows on from v1.0 and v2.0).
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Happy 10th Birthday, Blopig!
OPIG recently celebrated its 20th year; and on 10 January 2023 I gave a talk just a day before the 10th anniversary of BLOPIG’s first blog post. It’s worth reflecting on what’s stayed the same and what’s changed since then.
Continue readingCryoEM is now the dominant technique for solving antibody structures
Last year, the Structural Antibody Database (SAbDab) listed a record-breaking 894 new antibody structures, driven in no small part by the continued efforts of the researchers to understand SARS-CoV-2.
In this blog post I wanted to highlight the major driving force behind this curve – the huge increase in cryo electron microscopy (cryoEM) data – and the implications of this for the field of structure-based antibody informatics.
Continue readingNew 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 readingOne of my other hats – Covid-19 Response Director for UK research and innovation
The group asked me if I would tell them a little bit about one of my other hats at our regular Tuesday meeting, and this blog is about that.
In October 2019 I was seconded part-time to UKRI as the Deputy Executive Chair of the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research council (EPSRC). What is UKRI (UK research and Innovation)? It’s a non-departmental public body that funds research and innovation. It is made up of the seven disciplinary research councils (acronyms to please Tom – AHRC, BBSRC, EPSRC, ESRC, NERC, STFC and MRC), Research England, and the UK’s innovation agency, Innovate UK.
As Deputy Executive Chair of EPSRC I was helping with UKRI strategy, learning how a spending review round works, visiting universities to talk about how they could work better with UKRI – pretty much everything I was expecting to be doing. But like everyone, my world changed in early 2020.
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.
Pets can catch coronavirus too
We have two cats at home, one of which habitually roams around the neighbourhood. This prompted my mother to have concerns about animals and specifically pets as carriers of the virus so I thought I’d read up a bit on this.
Continue readingThe 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 readingCoronavirus
A zoonosis is an infectious disease that has jumped from a non-human animal to humans.
The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) is one such zoonosis, and is caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS coronavirus 2, SARS-CoV-2, or 2019-nCoV). This is very similar to the SARS virus that emerged in 2003. Its recent emergence has resulted in a WHO-declared public health emergency of international concern.
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