The new method, published in Science Advances, reduces the time needed to identify protective antibodies from weeks to under a day—while offering a scalable approach that minimizes data bottlenecks and accelerates research. This advancement could transform how researchers develop treatments for influenza, HIV and other infectious diseases, particularly during health emergencies where rapid response is critical.

“This represents a paradigm shift in how we discover antibodies,” says study senior author Andrew Ward, professor in the Department of Integrative Structural and Computational Biology at Scripps Research. “By harnessing AI to analyze the structural details of immune responses, we can now identify the most promising therapeutic candidates in mere hours, with better success rates than traditional methods. This could be game-changing for pandemic preparedness and therapeutic development.”