SynthImmune PIs Prof. Dr. Dominik Niopek (Heidelberg University) and Prof. Dr. Nina Papavasiliou (German Cancer Research Center, DKFZ) have secured a prestigious ERC Synergy Grant together with collaborators from the UK and the US. The six-year project, coordinated at DKFZ, receives approximately €10 million to develop an AI-based approach to identify antigens from antibody sequences.
The project, titled TrypanoFormer – Toward A Trypanosome-Informed Machine-Learning Framework for Bidirectional Antigen-Antibody Prediction, brings together the two Heidelberg researchers with Prof. Dr. Bill Wickstead (University of Nottingham) and Prof. Dr. Monica Mugnier (Johns Hopkins University).
The researchers aim to develop machine-learning models that can predict which antigens an antibody recognizes based solely on its amino acid sequence – and ultimately design antibodies for specific targets. To generate the large and diverse datasets needed to train these models, the team will use trypanosomes, microscopic parasites that constantly change their surface proteins to evade the immune system. Their remarkable antigen diversity makes them a promising tool for studying a wide range of antibody-antigen interactions.
The project could open new avenues for understanding immune responses, advancing precision diagnostics, and engineering tailored immune responses – a key research interest of SynthImmune.
Read more about the project here (German only).
