SSH2.0: A Better Tool for Predicting the Hydrophobic Interaction Risk of Monoclonal Antibody

Therapeutic antibodies play a crucial role in the treatment of various diseases. However, the success rate of antibody drug development is low partially because of unfavourable biophysical properties of antibody drug candidates such as the high aggregation tendency, which is mainly driven by hydrophobic interactions of antibody molecules. Therefore, early screening of the risk of hydrophobic interaction of antibody drug candidates is crucial. Experimental screening is laborious, time-consuming, and costly, warranting the development of efficient and high-throughput computational tools for prediction of hydrophobic interactions of therapeutic antibodies. In the present study, 131 antibodies with hydrophobic interaction experiment data were used to train a new support vector machine-based ensemble model, termed SSH2.0, to predict the hydrophobic interactions of antibodies. Feature selection was performed against CKSAAGP by using the graph-based algorithm MRMD2.0. Based on the antibody sequence, SSH2.0 achieved the sensitivity and accuracy of 100.00 and 83.97%, respectively. This approach eliminates the need of three-dimensional structure of antibodies and enables rapid screening of therapeutic antibody candidates in the early developmental stage, thereby saving time and cost. In addition, a web server was constructed that is freely available at http://i.uestc.edu.cn/SSH2/.