Statistical expertise in drug discovery
A suite of statistical tools developed by the Oxford Protein Informatics Group in Oxford University’s Department of Statistics, SAbDab and SAbPred, is providing major companies with valuable tools for drug discovery.
The tools have been accessed by over 100 international pharmaceutical companies, enabling them to accelerate the development of therapeutic antibodies. Many of these companies have also accessed expertise to implement the tools, arranged by the Consultancy Services team of Oxford University Innovation.
Researchers all over the world are searching for the next generation of drugs to combat some of the greatest health threats of the century. However, a major challenge in the drug discovery process is finding the right molecule with which to fight a disease – it can be enormously time-consuming and expensive to test new drug candidates systematically in the lab to identify the ones with promising therapeutic properties to take forward into clinical trials.
In the quest to find new drugs, one class of proteins, antibodies, is of particular interest. Antibodies bind to antigens on the surface of a bacteria or virus and so mark it out as an invader. They are the most important and successful class of bio-therapeutics and have been approved for a wide range of uses including cancer treatment, with several also identified as promising treatments for COVID-19.
Since 2014, the Department of Statistics has been developing tools to make the process of antibody discovery dramatically quicker and more efficient. As with other drug candidates, there are vast numbers of antibodies that could be considered, so researchers in the Oxford Protein Informatics Group, led by Professor Charlotte Deane, have been developing a suite of freely-available statistical software which is able to model antibodies in three dimensions and predict what properties they will have. The software helps companies to prioritise which antibodies they should investigate further, and even to design entirely new antibodies.
From 2016 onwards, the Group refined the software tools and then worked with companies who wished to bring the tools in-house. Consultancies with over a dozen companies were arranged and managed by Oxford University Innovation’s Consultancy Services team to enable this. This innovative model led to sustained engagement with industry, allowing the tools to be adjusted and improved so that they were easier to use. This eventually led to the tools being packaged as a single ‘virtual machine’ that can be downloaded and used by companies. More recently, a containerised version, SAbBox, has also been developed, further increasing the accessibility of the tools.
The suite has now been used by major companies, including GlaxoSmithKline and UCB, and has enabled and accelerated the development of therapeutic antibodies by these companies, helping them to reduce costs, deliver more accurate results, and ultimately bring treatments to patients more quickly.
