Researchers affiliated with UTHealth Houston, competing under the team name Novamab AI, placed among the top five teams in the international AIntibody Challenge, a blinded, prospective benchmark published in Nature Biotechnology.

The study, “A blinded, prospective benchmark of in-silico antibody discovery anchored to experimental affinity and developability,” evaluates artificial intelligence platforms for therapeutic antibody design through laboratory synthesis and experimental characterization.

Unlike retrospective computational benchmarks that evaluate models against historical data sets, the AIntibody Challenge required participating teams to design entirely new antibody sequences. The designs were independently synthesized and experimentally evaluated for binding affinity and developability—key physical and chemical traits required for clinical drug candidates.