Kidins220 regulates the development of B cells bearing the λ light chain

The ratio between κ and λ light chain (LC)-expressing B cells varies considerably between species. We recently identified Kinase D-interacting substrate of 220 kDa (Kidins220) as an interaction partner of the BCR. In vivo ablation of Kidins220 in B cells resulted in a marked reduction of λLC-expressing B cells. Kidins220 knockout B cells fail to open and recombine the genes of the Igl locus, even in genetic scenarios where the Igk genes cannot be rearranged or where the κLC confers autoreactivity. Igk gene recombination and expression in Kidins220-deficient B cells is normal. Kidins220 regulates the development of λLC B cells by enhancing the survival of developing B cells and thereby extending the time-window in which the Igl locus opens and the genes are rearranged and transcribed. Further, our data suggest that Kidins220 guarantees optimal pre-BCR and BCR signaling to induce Igl locus opening and gene recombination during B cell development and receptor editing.

The dengue-specific immune response and antibody identification with machine learning

Dengue virus poses a serious threat to global health and there is no specific therapeutic for it. Broadly neutralizing antibodies recognizing all serotypes may be an effective treatment. High-throughput adaptive immune receptor repertoire sequencing (AIRR-seq) and bioinformatic analysis enable in-depth understanding of the B-cell immune response. Here, we investigate the dengue antibody response with these technologies and apply machine learning to identify rare and underrepresented broadly neutralizing antibody sequences. Dengue immunization elicited the following signatures on the antibody repertoire: (i) an increase of CDR3 and germline gene diversity; (ii) a change in the antibody repertoire architecture by eliciting power-law network distributions and CDR3 enrichment in polar amino acids; (iii) an increase in the expression of JNK/Fos transcription factors and ribosomal proteins. Furthermore, we demonstrate the applicability of computational methods and machine learning to AIRR-seq datasets for neutralizing antibody candidate sequence identification. Antibody expression and functional assays have validated the obtained results.

Unconstrained generation of synthetic antibody-antigen structures to guide machine learning methodology for antibody specificity prediction

Machine learning (ML) is a key technology for accurate prediction of antibody-antigen binding. Two orthogonal problems hinder the application of ML to antibody-specificity prediction and the benchmarking thereof: the lack of a unified ML formalization of immunological antibody-specificity prediction problems and the unavailability of large-scale synthetic datasets to benchmark real-world relevant ML methods and dataset design. Here we developed the Absolut! software suite that enables parameter-based unconstrained generation of synthetic lattice-based three-dimensional antibody-antigen-binding structures with ground-truth access to conformational paratope, epitope and affinity. We formalized common immunological antibody-specificity prediction problems as ML tasks and confirmed that for both sequence- and structure-based tasks, accuracy-based rankings of ML methods trained on experimental data hold for ML methods trained on Absolut!-generated data. The Absolut! framework has the potential to enable real-world relevant development and benchmarking of ML strategies for biotherapeutics design.

Adaptive Immune Receptor Repertoire (AIRR) Community Guide to Repertoire Analysis

Adaptive immune receptor repertoires (AIRRs) are rich with information that can be mined for insights into the workings of the immune system. Gene usage, CDR3 properties, clonal lineage structure, and sequence diversity are all capable of revealing the dynamic immune response to perturbation by disease, vaccination, or other interventions. Here we focus on a conceptual introduction to the many aspects of repertoire analysis and orient the reader toward the uses and advantages of each. Along the way, we note some of the many software tools that have been developed for these investigations and link the ideas discussed to chapters on methods provided elsewhere in this volume.

In silico proof of principle of machine learning-based antibody design at unconstrained scale

Generative machine learning (ML) has been postulated to become a major driver in the computational design of antigen-specific monoclonal antibodies (mAb). However, efforts to confirm this hypothesis have been hindered by the infeasibility of testing arbitrarily large numbers of antibody sequences for their most critical design parameters: paratope, epitope, affinity, and developability. To address this challenge, we leveraged a lattice-based antibody-antigen binding simulation framework, which incorporates a wide range of physiological antibody-binding parameters. The simulation framework enables the computation of synthetic antibody-antigen 3D-structures, and it functions as an oracle for unrestricted prospective evaluation and benchmarking of antibody design parameters of ML-generated antibody sequences. We found that a deep generative model, trained exclusively on antibody sequence (one dimensional: 1D) data can be used to design conformational (three dimensional: 3D) epitope-specific antibodies, matching, or exceeding the training dataset in affinity and developability parameter value variety. Furthermore, we established a lower threshold of sequence diversity necessary for high-accuracy generative antibody ML and demonstrated that this lower threshold also holds on experimental real-world data. Finally, we show that transfer learning enables the generation of high-affinity antibody sequences from low-N training data. Our work establishes a priori feasibility and the theoretical foundation of high-throughput ML-based mAb design.

Machine Learning Detects Anti-DENV Signatures in Antibody Repertoire Sequences

Dengue infection is a global threat. As of today, there is no universal dengue fever treatment or vaccines unreservedly recommended by the World Health Organization. The investigation of the specific immune response to dengue virus would support antibody discovery as therapeutics for passive immunization and vaccine design. High-throughput sequencing enables the identification of the multitude of antibodies elicited in response to dengue infection at the sequence level. Artificial intelligence can mine the complex data generated and has the potential to uncover patterns in entire antibody repertoires and detect signatures distinctive of single virus-binding antibodies. However, these machine learning have not been harnessed to determine the immune response to dengue virus. In order to enable the application of machine learning, we have benchmarked existing methods for encoding biological and chemical knowledge as inputs and have investigated novel encoding techniques. We have applied different machine learning methods such as neural networks, random forests, and support vector machines and have investigated the parameter space to determine best performing algorithms for the detection and prediction of antibody patterns at the repertoire and antibody sequence levels in dengue-infected individuals. Our results show that immune response signatures to dengue are detectable both at the antibody repertoire and at the antibody sequence levels. By combining machine learning with phylogenies and network analysis, we generated novel sequences that present dengue-binding specific signatures. These results might aid further antibody discovery and support vaccine design.

The Real-World Data Challenges Radar: A Review on the Challenges and Risks regarding the Use of Real-World Data

Background

The life science industry has a strong interest in real-world data (RWD), a term that is currently being used in many ways and with varying definitions depending on the source. In this review article, we provide a summary overview of the challenges and risks regarding the use of RWD and its translation into real-world evidence and provide a classification and visualization of RWD challenges by means of the RWD Challenges Radar.

Summary

Based on a systematic literature search, we identified 3 types of challenges - organizational, technological, and people-based - that must be addressed when deriving evidence from RWD to be used in drug approval and other applications. It further demonstrates that numerous different aspects, for example, related to the application field and the associated industry, must be considered. A key finding in our review is that the regulatory landscape must be carefully assessed before utilizing RWD.

Key Messages

Establishing awareness and insight into the challenges and risks regarding the use of RWD will be key to taking full advantage of the RWD potential. As a result of this review, an "RWD Challenges Radar" will support the establishment of awareness by providing a comprehensive overview of the relevant aspects to be considered when employing RWD.

Prospective Artificial Intelligence to Dissect the Dengue Immune Response and Discover Therapeutics

Dengue virus (DENV) poses a serious threat to global health as the causative agent of dengue fever. The virus is endemic in more than 128 countries resulting in approximately 390 million infection cases each year. Currently, there is no approved therapeutic for treatment nor a fully efficacious vaccine. The development of therapeutics is confounded and hampered by the complexity of the immune response to DENV, in particular to sequential infection with different DENV serotypes (DENV1-5). Researchers have shown that the DENV envelope (E) antigen is primarily responsible for the interaction and subsequent invasion of host cells for all serotypes and can elicit neutralizing antibodies in humans. The advent of high-throughput sequencing and the rapid advancements in computational analysis of complex data, has provided tools for the deconvolution of the DENV immune response. Several types of complex statistical analyses, machine learning models and complex visualizations can be applied to begin answering questions about the B- and T-cell immune responses to multiple infections, antibody-dependent enhancement, identification of novel therapeutics and advance vaccine research.

RWD-Cockpit: Application for Quality Assessment of Real-World Data (Preprint)

Background

Digital technologies are transforming the health care system. A large part of information is generated as real-world data (RWD). Data from electronic health records and digital biomarkers have the potential to reveal associations between the benefits and adverse events of medicines, establish new patient-stratification principles, expose unknown disease correlations, and inform on preventive measures. The impact for health care payers and providers, the biopharmaceutical industry, and governments is massive in terms of health outcomes, quality of care, and cost. However, a framework to assess the preliminary quality of RWD is missing, thus hindering the conduct of population-based observational studies to support regulatory decision-making and real-world evidence.

Objective

To address the need to qualify RWD, we aimed to build a web application as a tool to translate characterization of some quality parameters of RWD into a metric and propose a standard framework for evaluating the quality of the RWD.

Methods

The RWD-Cockpit systematically scores data sets based on proposed quality metrics and customizable variables chosen by the user. Sleep RWD generated de novo and publicly available data sets were used to validate the usability and applicability of the web application. The RWD quality score is based on the evaluation of 7 variables: manageability specifies access and publication status; complexity defines univariate, multivariate, and longitudinal data; sample size indicates the size of the sample or samples; privacy and liability stipulates privacy rules; accessibility specifies how the data set can be accessed and to what granularity; periodicity specifies how often the data set is updated; and standardization specifies whether the data set adheres to any specific technical or metadata standard. These variables are associated with several descriptors that define specific characteristics of the data set.

Results

To address the need to qualify RWD, we built the RWD-Cockpit web application, which proposes a framework and applies a common standard for a preliminary evaluation of RWD quality across data sets—molecular, phenotypical, and social—and proposes a standard that can be further personalized by the community retaining an internal standard. Applied to 2 different case studies—de novo–generated sleep data and publicly available data sets—the RWD-Cockpit could identify and provide researchers with variables that might increase quality.

Conclusions

The results from the application of the framework of RWD metrics implemented in the RWD-Cockpit application suggests that multiple data sets can be preliminarily evaluated in terms of quality using the proposed metrics. The output scores—quality identifiers—provide a first quality assessment for the use of RWD. Although extensive challenges remain to be addressed to set RWD quality standards, our proposal can serve as an initial blueprint for community efforts in the characterization of RWD quality for regulated settings.

A compact vocabulary of paratope-epitope interactions enables predictability of antibody-antigen binding

Antibody-antigen binding relies on the specific interaction of amino acids at the paratope-epitope interface. The predictability of antibody-antigen binding is a prerequisite for de novo antibody and (neo-)epitope design. A fundamental premise for the predictability of antibody-antigen binding is the existence of paratope-epitope interaction motifs that are universally shared among antibody-antigen structures. In a dataset of non-redundant antibody-antigen structures, we identify structural interaction motifs, which together compose a commonly shared structure-based vocabulary of paratope-epitope interactions. We show that this vocabulary enables the machine learnability of antibody-antigen binding on the paratope-epitope level using generative machine learning. The vocabulary (1) is compact, less than 10⁴ motifs; (2) distinct from non-immune protein-protein interactions; and (3) mediates specific oligo- and polyreactive interactions between paratope-epitope pairs. Our work leverages combined structure- and sequence-based learning to demonstrate that machine-learning-driven predictive paratope and epitope engineering is feasible.

Benchmarking immunoinformatic tools for the analysis of antibody repertoire sequences

Summary

Antibody repertoires reveal insights into the biology of the adaptive immune system and empower diagnostics and therapeutics. There are currently multiple tools available for the annotation of antibody sequences. All downstream analyses such as choosing lead drug candidates depend on the correct annotation of these sequences; however, a thorough comparison of the performance of these tools has not been investigated. Here, we benchmark the performance of commonly used immunoinformatic tools, i.e. IMGT/HighV-QUEST, IgBLAST and MiXCR, in terms of reproducibility of annotation output, accuracy and speed using simulated and experimental high-throughput sequencing datasets.

We analyzed changes in IMGT reference germline database in the last 10 years in order to assess the reproducibility of the annotation output. We found that only 73/183 (40%) V, D and J human genes were shared between the reference germline sets used by the tools. We found that the annotation results differed between tools. In terms of alignment accuracy, MiXCR had the highest average frequency of gene mishits, 0.02 mishit frequency and IgBLAST the lowest, 0.004 mishit frequency. Reproducibility in the output of complementarity determining three regions (CDR3 amino acids) ranged from 4.3% to 77.6% with preprocessed data. In addition, run time of the tools was assessed: MiXCR was the fastest tool for number of sequences processed per unit of time. These results indicate that immunoinformatic analyses greatly depend on the choice of bioinformatics tool. Our results support informed decision-making to immunoinformaticians based on repertoire composition and sequencing platforms.

Availability and implementation

All tools utilized in the paper are free for academic use.

Supplementary information

Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.

Maturation of the Human Immunoglobulin Heavy Chain Repertoire With Age

B cells play a central role in adaptive immune processes, mainly through the production of antibodies. The maturation of the B cell system with age is poorly studied. We extensively investigated age-related alterations of naïve and antigen-experienced immunoglobulin heavy chain (IgH) repertoires. The most significant changes were observed in the first 10 years of life, and were characterized by altered immunoglobulin gene usage and an increased frequency of mutated antibodies structurally diverging from their germline precursors. Older age was associated with an increased usage of downstream IgH constant region genes and fewer antibodies with self-reactive properties. As mutations accumulated with age, the frequency of germline-encoded self-reactive antibodies decreased, indicating a possible beneficial role of self-reactive B cells in the developing immune system. Our results suggest a continuous process of change through childhood across a broad range of parameters characterizing IgH repertoires and stress the importance of using well-selected, age-appropriate controls in IgH studies.

Traditional and Digital Biomarkers: Two Worlds Apart?

The identification and application of biomarkers in the clinical and medical fields has an enormous impact on society. The increase of digital devices and the rise in popularity of health-related mobile apps has produced a new trove of biomarkers in large, diverse, and complex data. However, the unclear definition of digital biomarkers, population groups, and their intersection with traditional biomarkers hinders their discovery and validation. We have identified current issues in the field of digital biomarkers and put forth suggestions to address them during the DayOne Workshop with participants from academia and industry. We have found similarities and differences between traditional and digital biomarkers in order to synchronize semantics, define unique features, review current regulatory procedures, and describe novel applications that enable precision medicine.

Large-scale network analysis reveals the sequence space architecture of antibody repertoires

The architecture of mouse and human antibody repertoires is defined by the sequence similarity networks of the clones that compose them. The major principles that define the architecture of antibody repertoires have remained largely unknown. Here, we establish a high-performance computing platform to construct large-scale networks from comprehensive human and murine antibody repertoire sequencing datasets (>100,000 unique sequences). Leveraging a network-based statistical framework, we identify three fundamental principles of antibody repertoire architecture: reproducibility, robustness and redundancy. Antibody repertoire networks are highly reproducible across individuals despite high antibody sequence dissimilarity. The architecture of antibody repertoires is robust to the removal of up to 50-90% of randomly selected clones, but fragile to the removal of public clones shared among individuals. Finally, repertoire architecture is intrinsically redundant. Our analysis provides guidelines for the large-scale network analysis of immune repertoires and may be used in the future to define disease-associated and synthetic repertoires.

Comparison of methods for phylogenetic B-cell lineage inference using time-resolved antibody repertoire simulations (AbSim)

Motivation

The evolution of antibody repertoires represents a hallmark feature of adaptive B-cell immunity. Recent advancements in high-throughput sequencing have dramatically increased the resolution to which we can measure the molecular diversity of antibody repertoires, thereby offering for the first time the possibility to capture the antigen-driven evolution of B cells. However, there does not exist a repertoire simulation framework yet that enables the comparison of commonly utilized phylogenetic methods with regard to their accuracy in inferring antibody evolution.

Results

Here, we developed AbSim, a time-resolved antibody repertoire simulation framework, which we exploited for testing the accuracy of methods for the phylogenetic reconstruction of B-cell lineages and antibody molecular evolution. AbSim enables the (i) simulation of intermediate stages of antibody sequence evolution and (ii) the modeling of immunologically relevant parameters such as duration of repertoire evolution, and the method and frequency of mutations. First, we validated that our repertoire simulation framework recreates replicates topological similarities observed in experimental sequencing data. Second, we leveraged Absim to show that current methods fail to a certain extent to predict the true phylogenetic tree correctly. Finally, we formulated simulation-validated guidelines for antibody evolution, which in the future will enable the development of accurate phylogenetic methods.

Availability and implementation

https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/AbSim/index.html.

Contact

sai.reddy@ethz.ch.

Supplementary information

Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.

Synthetic Standards Combined With Error and Bias Correction Improve the Accuracy and Quantitative Resolution of Antibody Repertoire Sequencing in Human Naïve and Memory B Cells

High-throughput sequencing of immunoglobulin (Ig) repertoires (Ig-seq) is a powerful method for quantitatively interrogating B cell receptor sequence diversity. When applied to human repertoires, Ig-seq provides insight into fundamental immunological questions, and can be implemented in diagnostic and drug discovery projects. However, a major challenge in Ig-seq is ensuring accuracy, as library preparation protocols and sequencing platforms can introduce substantial errors and bias that compromise immunological interpretation. Here, we have established an approach for performing highly accurate human Ig-seq by combining synthetic standards with a comprehensive error and bias correction pipeline. First, we designed a set of 85 synthetic antibody heavy-chain standards (in vitro transcribed RNA) to assess correction workflow fidelity. Next, we adapted a library preparation protocol that incorporates unique molecular identifiers (UIDs) for error and bias correction which, when applied to the synthetic standards, resulted in highly accurate data. Finally, we performed Ig-seq on purified human circulating B cell subsets (naïve and memory), combined with a cellular replicate sampling strategy. This strategy enabled robust and reliable estimation of key repertoire features such as clonotype diversity, germline segment, and isotype subclass usage, and somatic hypermutation. We anticipate that our standards and error and bias correction pipeline will become a valuable tool for researchers to validate and improve accuracy in human Ig-seq studies, thus leading to potentially new insights and applications in human antibody repertoire profiling.

Computational Strategies for Dissecting the High-Dimensional Complexity of Adaptive Immune Repertoires

The adaptive immune system recognizes antigens via an immense array of antigen-binding antibodies and T-cell receptors, the immune repertoire. The interrogation of immune repertoires is of high relevance for understanding the adaptive immune response in disease and infection (e.g., autoimmunity, cancer, HIV). Adaptive immune receptor repertoire sequencing (AIRR-seq) has driven the quantitative and molecular-level profiling of immune repertoires, thereby revealing the high-dimensional complexity of the immune receptor sequence landscape. Several methods for the computational and statistical analysis of large-scale AIRR-seq data have been developed to resolve immune repertoire complexity and to understand the dynamics of adaptive immunity. Here, we review the current research on (i) diversity, (ii) clustering and network, (iii) phylogenetic, and (iv) machine learning methods applied to dissect, quantify, and compare the architecture, evolution, and specificity of immune repertoires. We summarize outstanding questions in computational immunology and propose future directions for systems immunology toward coupling AIRR-seq with the computational discovery of immunotherapeutics, vaccines, and immunodiagnostics.