Biopharmaceutical Informatics
As with small molecules, computation can also play a major role in the discovery and development of biotherapeutics. The early applications of computation towards biotherapeutics started emerging in the literature about 15 years ago (e.g., Chennamsetty et al Design of therapeutic proteins with enhanced stability (PNAS, 2009) and were focused on the issue of the developability of biotherapeutics. Dr. Sandeep Kumar started using the term “Biopharmaceutical Informatics” in conference presentations around 2014 and wrote a book chapter entitled “Biopharmaceutical Informatics: Applications of Computation in Biologic Drug Development” describing his vision in the book entitled “Developability of Biotherapeutics: Computational Approaches” (doi.org/10.1201/b19023). The first peer-reviewed article further elaborating his vision of Biopharmaceutical Informatics was published in 2018 (doi: 10.1111/jphp.12700). Since then, the scope of Biopharmaceutical Informatics has expanded substantially to include biologic drug discovery as well (see S. Kumar. Reflections on 2018: Extending Biopharmaceutical Informatics to Biologic Drug Discovery). As is evident from papers recently published in mAbs, computation is now being increasingly used in both discovery and development of antibody-based biologic drugs and Biopharmaceutical Informatics is rapidly emerging as a field on its own. To celebrate the rise of Biopharmaceutical Informatics, we invited authors to contribute articles focused on highlighting how computation has enabled their investigations or led them to new ones. As can be seen below, the resulting papers narrate the state of the art and speculate on new vistas for computational applications in the field. We thank the authors for their contributions and look forwarded to a state in biologic drug discovery where computation shall become an independent engine for biologic drug discovery in addition to supporting the experiment driven discovery and development projects.
Edited by
Dr. Sandeep Kumar(Distinguished Research Fellow, Biotherapeutics Discovery, Boehringer Ingelheim)
Dr. Janice Reichert(Executive Director, The Antibody Society, and Editor-in-Chief, mAbs)