English

Physicochemically Informed Dual-Conditioned Generative Model of T-Cell Receptor Variable Regions for Cellular Therapy

Computational Engineering, Finance, and Science 2025-10-08 v1 Biomolecules

Abstract

Physicochemically informed biological sequence generation has the potential to accelerate computer-aided cellular therapy, yet current models fail to \emph{jointly} ensure novelty, diversity, and biophysical plausibility when designing variable regions of T-cell receptors (TCRs). We present \textbf{PhysicoGPTCR}, a large generative protein Transformer that is \emph{dual-conditioned} on peptide and HLA context and trained to autoregressively synthesise TCR sequences while embedding residue-level physicochemical descriptors. The model is optimised on curated TCR--peptide--HLA triples with a maximum-likelihood objective and compared against ANN, GPTCR, LSTM, and VAE baselines. Across multiple neoantigen benchmarks, PhysicoGPTCR substantially improves edit-distance, similarity, and longest-common-subsequence scores, while populating a broader region of sequence space. Blind in-silico docking and structural modelling further reveal a higher proportion of binding-competent clones than the strongest baseline, validating the benefit of explicit context conditioning and physicochemical awareness. Experimental results demonstrate that dual-conditioned, physics-grounded generative modelling enables end-to-end design of functional TCR candidates, reducing the discovery timeline from months to minutes without sacrificing wet-lab verifiability.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2510.05747,
  title  = {Physicochemically Informed Dual-Conditioned Generative Model of T-Cell Receptor Variable Regions for Cellular Therapy},
  author = {Jiahao Ma and Hongzong Li and Ye-Fan Hu and Jian-Dong Huang},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2510.05747},
  year   = {2025}
}