Antibody engineering and therapeutics conference

Half-day pre-conference workshops on three-dimensional (3D) structure antibody modeling and on identifying clonal lineages from next-generation data sets of expressed VH gene sequences will be held on Sunday December 8, 2013. The modeling workshop will be moderated by Juan Carlos Almagro (Pfizer, Inc and Gary L Gilliland (Janssen R&D, Inc. With the success of antibody-based therapeutics, protein engineering efforts are underway throughout the research community to produce efficacious biologics with the appropriate specificities, affinities, cross-reactivity, biological activities and biophysical properties required for developing successful therapies. The requirement for accurate 3D structures of antibodies is a critical aspect of this process. Protein crystallographic efforts are one approach for fulfilling this need, but, if time is short or crystallization is not fruitful, homology modeling is a viable alternative. The 3D structure antibody modeling workshop will focus on the current state-of-the-art in antibody variable region modeling and the results of a second Antibody Modeling Assessment, following on from the first assessment. For the second assessment, sequences of 11 benchmark antibody F V regions whose structures were determined at Janssen R&D and Ian Wilson’s lab at The Scripps Research Institute, but were not yet deposited in the Protein Data Bank were provided to the modeling participants. These F V regions were from diverse species and covered a broad range of antigen combining site conformations. The participants included teams from Accelrys Software, Inc Chemical Computing Group, Inc, Johns Hopkins University (Gray Lab), Astellas Pharma, Macromoltek, and Schrödinger. The sequences of the V-regions were also submitted to the Prediction of ImmunoGlobulin Structure (PIGS) web server to generate models for comparison. The resulting models were compared with the unreported crystal *Correspondence to: Janice M Reichert; Email: [email protected] Submitted: 09/19/2013; Accepted: 09/19/2013 http://dx.doi.org/10.4161/mabs.26545 Antibody Engineering and Therapeutics Conference The Annual Meeting of the Antibody Society, December 8–12, 2013, Huntington Beach, CA