SAGERank: inductive learning of protein–protein interaction from antibody–antigen recognition

Predicting Antibody-Antigen (Ab-Ag) docking and structure-based design represent significant long-term and therapeutically important challenges in computational biology. We present SAGERank, a general, configurable deep learning framework for antibody design using Graph Sample and Aggregate Networks. SAGERank successfully predicted the majority of epitopes in a cancer target dataset. In nanobody-antigen structure prediction, SAGERank, coupled with a protein dynamics structure prediction algorithm, slightly outperforms Alphafold3. Most importantly, our study demonstrates the real potential of inductive deep learning to overcome the small dataset problem in molecular science. The SAGERank models trained for antibody-antigen docking can be used to examine general protein-protein interaction tasks, such as T Cell Receptor-peptide-Major Histocompatibility Complex (TCR-pMHC) recognition, classification of biological <i>versus</i> crystal interfaces, and prediction of ternary complexes of molecular glues. In the cases of ranking docking decoys and identifying biological interfaces, SAGERank is competitive with or outperforms state-of-the-art methods.