A-Alpha Bio launches five-member consortium for shared antibody measurements

A-Alpha Bio launches five-member consortium for shared antibody measurements

On July 22, A-Alpha Bio announced the Atlas Consortium. GSK, Boltz, Cradle, Dyno Therapeutics, and one other member will jointly plan experiments that measure antibody binding to antigens, then receive the pooled results every quarter.

A model cannot propose a new antibody from the sequences of the antibody and its target alone. It also needs a laboratory result that shows how strongly the pair binds. This binding strength is called affinity. An antibody and antigen pair with a measured affinity becomes a training example for the model. In the May evaluation of protein models, the computational search also ended with a laboratory measurement of whether the designed protein bound to its target.

These examples are difficult to compare when laboratories use different protocols. One group tests one set of molecular pairs, another changes the experimental conditions, and a third uses a different method. The model receives many results, but has more difficulty separating the properties of the molecules from differences between experiments.

Atlas members will jointly decide which antibody and antigen pairs to measure. A-Alpha Bio will run these experiments on AlphaSeq under identical conditions, combine the results with its own experimental series, and provide the resulting dataset to all subscribers every quarter. Each new series will provide both training data and a shared evaluation of the members' models.

A-Alpha Bio estimates that, with five founding members, each member will receive about 28 million affinity measurements per year. If membership grows to twenty, the annual volume available to each member will rise to 100 million measurements, according to the Atlas Consortium announcement.

Atlas already has data to work with. In a release dated July 7, the company said that it was transferring more than 450 million affinity measurements and over 7 thousand experimentally validated pseudostructures of antibody and antigen complexes into Atlas. The consortium will add regular experimental series that its members plan together.

Every quarter, the members will agree on a new set of molecules, and AlphaSeq will measure them using a single protocol. All members will then compare their models' predictions against the same results. The laboratory measurements will therefore become shared data for the next round of antibody design.