Antibody Design and Optimization with Multi-scale Equivariant Graph Diffusion Models for Accurate Complex Antigen Binding
Journal:
arXiv
Published Date:
Jun 26, 2025
Abstract
Antibody design remains a critical challenge in therapeutic and diagnostic
development, particularly for complex antigens with diverse binding interfaces.
Current computational methods face two main limitations: (1) capturing
geometric features while preserving symmetries, and (2) generalizing novel
antigen interfaces. Despite recent advancements, these methods often fail to
accurately capture molecular interactions and maintain structural integrity. To
address these challenges, we propose \textbf{AbMEGD}, an end-to-end framework
integrating \textbf{M}ulti-scale \textbf{E}quivariant \textbf{G}raph
\textbf{D}iffusion for antibody sequence and structure co-design. Leveraging
advanced geometric deep learning, AbMEGD combines atomic-level geometric
features with residue-level embeddings, capturing local atomic details and
global sequence-structure interactions. Its E(3)-equivariant diffusion method
ensures geometric precision, computational efficiency, and robust
generalizability for complex antigens. Furthermore, experiments using the
SAbDab database demonstrate a 10.13\% increase in amino acid recovery, 3.32\%
rise in improvement percentage, and a 0.062~\AA\ reduction in root mean square
deviation within the critical CDR-H3 region compared to DiffAb, a leading
antibody design model. These results highlight AbMEGD's ability to balance
structural integrity with improved functionality, establishing a new benchmark
for sequence-structure co-design and affinity optimization. The code is
available at: https://github.com/Patrick221215/AbMEGD.