Vanderbilt to experiment with AI to develop therapeutic antibodies

NASHVILLE, Tenn. (WSMV) - Vanderbilt University Medical Center will lead a massive project aimed at discovering therapeutic antibodies through the use of Artificial Intelligence.

Therapeutic antibodies are used to treat a wide range of diseases including many cancers, autoimmune, and infectious diseases.

Those leading the project at VUMC want to use AI to go beyond the traditional methods for antibody discovery.

“What we’re proposing to do is going to address all of these big bottlenecks with the traditional antibody discovery process and make it a more democratized process — where you can figure out what your antigen target is and have a good chance of generating a monoclonal antibody therapeutic against that target in a very effective and efficient way,” said Ivelin Georgiev, PhD, professor of Pathology and director of the Vanderbilt Center for Computational Microbiology and Immunology, and the project’s principal investigator.

Georgiev said traditional methods for antibody discovery are limited by a number of factors including high costs, inefficiency, logistical hurdles, and long turnaround times.

VUMC explained that to identify a therapeutic antibody, researchers must screen and test thousands of antibodies against an antigen. The traditional discovery process requires specific types of biological samples. VUMC explained that blood samples from people or animal models exposed to bacteria or a virus are required and if that bacteria or virus mutates, a therapeutic antibody may become ineffective.

Vanderbilt University Medical Center has been awarded up to $30 million by the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPAA-H) to use AI to identify and develop these potential therapeutic antibodies.