NAISS
SUPR
NAISS Projects
SUPR
Computational antiviral nanobody design
Dnr:

NAISS 2026/4-1600

Type:

NAISS Small

Principal Investigator:

Davide Angeletti

Affiliation:

Göteborgs universitet

Start Date:

2026-09-25

End Date:

2027-10-01

Primary Classification:

10605: Immunology (Medical aspects at 30110 and agricultural at 40302)

Webpage:

Allocation

Abstract

Until now, influenza A virus (IAV) is still a major public health burden primarily because of its capacity to evolve into multiple different strains through antigenic shift and drift of its surface glycoproteins. One of those glycoproteins is neuraminidase (NA). NA is a sialydase enzyme that functions by cleaving sialic acid binding to newly formed virions, allowing for virion release and preventing viral aggregation. It is only recently that NA has gained attention as a target in dealing with IAV. With that, antiviral drugs and monoclonal antibodies have been developed against it. What we are interested in is generating nanobodies against NA. Nanobodies are single domain antibodies that are approximately 15kDa in size. Because of its size, it can reach epitopes that a conventional antibody cannot. With this project, our aim is to use GERMINAL, a structure-based generative antibody-design pipeline, to generate nanobodies against specific epitopes of NA. Three different NA subtypes will be used for this project: N1, N8 and N9. N1 and N8 belong to the group 1 NA, while N9 belongs to group 2 NA. Even though they belong to different groups, they share the conserved catalytic site which is important for NA's enzymatic function. Independent computational design will be ran against the individual NA's, followed by evaluating candidate nanobodies against all three NA's. By doing this, we are making sure that the generated nanobodies are fully cross-reactive. Overall, we aim to test if we can generate cross-reactive nanobodies using a structure-based computational model.