2025 Ginkgo Datapoints Antibody Developability Competition outcomes: limited model performance and a call for data standardization
The Ginkgo Datapoints Antibody Developability (AbDev) Competition, a blinded benchmark for developability prediction characterized entirely on a single, industrial-scale experimental platform, was conducted from September 8 to November 18, 2025. We benchmarked predictors across five biophysical properties - hydrophobicity, thermostability, self-association, expression titer, and polyreactivity - using a public training set of 246 clinical antibodies and a blinded, held-out test set of 80 antibodies. We received submissions from 113 teams spanning 25 countries, 38 companies, and 39 universities. Winning submissions differed by assay. Top Spearman's ρ values on the test set reached 0.708 (hydrophobicity), 0.392 (thermostability), 0.356 (polyreactivity), 0.337 (self-association), and 0.310 (titer). Cross-validation scores from the public training set consistently exceeded held-out test performance, indicating overfitting and limited out-of-distribution generalization. Together, these results provide a standardized snapshot of current antibody developability modeling capabilities and highlight a key bottleneck: available datasets are too small and heterogeneous to support robust, assay-spanning prediction. Meaningful progress will require larger, standardized, and diverse experimental datasets - with harmonized protocols and rich metadata - to train and validate models that generalize reliably for future antibody discovery campaigns.
Authors
- Maximilian Schwenk
- Nels Thorsteinson (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8333-0045)
- Peter M. Tessier (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3220-007X)
- Oliver M. Turnbull (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0239-1207)
- Michael Chungyoun (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8416-5966)
- Aanal Bhatt (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0534-9274)
- Ammar Arsiwala (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5121-9163)
- Georgia Channing (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0009-0001-6354-7527)
- Xiang Ao (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0009-0002-3565-9473)
- Nathaniel L Blalock
- Shyam Chandra
- Netsanet Gebremedhin
- Nimra Asi
- Lucía Daniela Grippo (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0058-9279)
- Ameya Kulkarni (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4495-8838)
- Alexander Smith (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0009-0009-3298-4431)
- Porfirio Quintero-Cadena (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0067-5844)
- Vivek Kohar (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1813-1597)
- J Kim
- Daksh Sammi
- Valentin Badea
- Yolaine Pierre
- Rushikesh Jadhav
- Seth Ritter
- Aviral Singh
- Lood van Niekerk
- Antonín Dušek
- Rich Cohen
- Olga Allen
- Jiang Zhu
- Blake Harris
- Joshua Moller
- Charlotte M. Deane
- Laura Rand
- Adam Rosenbaum
Institutions
- Harvard University (US)
- Johns Hopkins University (US)
- Duke University (US)
- University of Michigan (US)
- University of Oxford (GB)
- Uni Research (Norway) (NO)
- Systems Dynamics (United States) (US)
- Creatv MicroTech (United States) (US)
- Ginkgo Bioworks, Inc. (United States) (US)
- Boehringer Ingelheim (Egypt) (EG)
- FACE Foundation (US)
- UCT Coatings (United States) (US)
- National Intelligence University (US)
- Hugging Face (US)
Publication Details
- Journal
- mAbs
- Published
- 2026-02-22
- DOI
- https://doi.org/10.1080/19420862.2026.2634216
- Primary Topic
- Ginkgo biloba and Cashew Applications
- Type
- article
- Field-Weighted Citation Impact
- 0.00