Beyond natural amino acids: Extending immunogenicity risk assessment to non-canonical peptide drugs through chemical feature encoding (opens in new tab)

Peptide therapeutics are increasingly used to treat challenging diseases, but immunogenicity risks limit their clinical success. In silico tools enable immunogenicity screening through prediction of peptide-MHCII binding, yet current methods fail to capture chemical properties of non-natural amino acids routinely incorporated to improve drug properties. Here, we present a machine learning approach combining chemical fingerprints with sequence information to predict MHC class II binding for bo...