Public antibody clonotypes and deep learning identify SARS-CoV-2 and HIV broadly neutralizing antibodies in immune repertoires
Broadly neutralizing antibodies (bnAbs) are essential for the development of vaccines and therapeutics against rapidly evolving pathogens like HIV and SARS-CoV-2, yet traditional discovery methods remain technically challenging and time consuming. Here, we introduce ClonoDeep, an AI-powered platform that integrates public antibody clonotypes with a sequence-based deep learning model to directly identify bnAbs from a large-scale immune repertoire, independent of antigen-specific immunization. Applied to SARS-CoV-2 repertoires, ClonoDeep identified 18 clonotype-derived antibody candidates; 83% of the candidates were neutralizing antibodies, and 8 of these antibodies demonstrated broad neutralization across variants. Structural analysis revealed that somatic hypermutations at HCDR3 His107/Gly109 are key enhancers of the binding affinity and neutralizing breadth. Extending to HIV, ClonoDeep uncovered three previously unreported bnAbs from non-HIV cohorts, indicating that rare bnAb-like precursors exist in non-HIV cohort repertoires. ClonoDeep establishes a high-throughput computational approach for mining neutralizing antibodies from antibody repertoires shaped by non-pathogen-specific immunity and provides design principles to guide vaccine strategies against genetically diverse pathogens.
Authors
- Yangtao Wu (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9429-266X)
- 余志立
- Hai Yu (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4378-0532)
- Qingbing Zheng (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7516-9965)
- Zhibo Kong
- Ningshao Xia (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0179-5266)
- Yuxuan Xiao (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1785-3096)
- Jiahua Gao
- Yiwen Zhang (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5232-0335)
- Qingyuan Liu (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0009-0008-6284-2963)
- Shaowei Li (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3374-1038)
- Yuehua Chen (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0009-0006-1343-7449)
- Shutian Lin
- Yue Ma
- Min Liang
- Yanan Jiang
- Yanqing Lin
- Jun Zhang
- Shaogui He
- Ying Gu
- Fan Liu
- Wenling Jiang
- Jingyu Dai
- Tingting Li
- Quan Yuan
- Siting Liang
- Lizhi Zhou
- Lisha Zhang
Institutions
- Xiamen University (CN)
Publication Details
- Journal
- Cell Reports
- Published
- 2026-06-19
- DOI
- https://doi.org/10.1016/j.celrep.2026.117582
- Primary Topic
- SARS-CoV-2 and COVID-19 Research
- Type
- article
- Field-Weighted Citation Impact
- 0.00
Funders
- National Natural Science Foundation of China
- National University's Basic Research Foundation of China