CoV-AbDab: the Coronavirus Antibody Database

Abstract

Motivation

The emergence of a novel strain of betacoronavirus, SARS-CoV-2, has led to a pandemic that has been associated with over 700,000 deaths as of 5 ^th August 2020. Research is ongoing around the world to create vaccines and therapies to minimise rates of disease spread and mortality. Crucial to these efforts are molecular characterisations of neutralising antibodies to SARS-CoV-2. Such antibodies would be valuable for measuring vaccine efficacy, diagnosing exposure, and developing effective biotherapeutics. Here, we describe our new database, CoV-AbDab, which already contains data on over 1400 published/patented antibodies and nanobodies known to bind to at least one betacoronavirus. This database is the first consolidation of antibodies known to bind SARS-CoV-2 as well as other betacoronaviruses such as SARS-CoV-1 and MERS-CoV. It contains relevant metadata including evidence of cross-neutralisation, antibody/nanobody origin, full variable domain sequence (where available) and germline assignments, epitope region, links to relevant PDB entries, homology models, and source literature.

Results

On 5 ^th August 2020, CoV-AbDab referenced sequence information on 1402 anti-coronavirus antibodies and nanobodies, spanning 66 papers and 21 patents. Of these, 1131 bind to SARS-CoV-2.

Availability

CoV-AbDab is free to access and download without registration at http://opig.stats.ox.ac.uk/webapps/coronavirus. Community submissions are encouraged.

Supplementary information

btaa739_Supplementary_Data

Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.