Computational Construction of Antibody–Drug Conjugates Using Surface Lysines as the Antibody Conjugation Site and a Non-cleavable Linker

Antibody-drug conjugates (ADCs) constitute a category of anticancer targeted therapy that has gathered great interest during the last few years because of their potential to kill cancer cells while causing significantly fewer side effects than traditional chemotherapy. In this paper, a process of computational construction of ADCs is described, using the surface lysines of an antibody and a non-covalent linker molecule, as well as a cytotoxic substance, as files in Protein Data Bank format. Also, aspects related to the function, properties, and development of ADCs are discussed.

ASSA, a Program for Three-Dimensional Rendering in Solution Scattering from Biopolymers

A program for three-dimensional rendering and interactive model refinement, ASSA, is presented. The program permits the simultaneous display and manipulation of low-resolution envelope models obtained from solution-scattering data and the crystallographic or electron microscopic models in the Brookhaven Protein Data Bank format. ASSA is coupled with the shape-determination program of Svergun, Volkov, Kozin, Stuhrmann, Barberato & Koch [J. Appl. Cryst. (1997). 30, 000–000], thus allowing one to monitor the shape determination process in real time. The program ASSA is written in C using the PHIGS+ standard for the three-dimensional solid rendering and the XView and XLib libraries for the menu-driven user interface. The system runs on a Sun SPARC ZX-20 workstation; a simplified IBM-PC version is also available.