harleyk

Antibodies are proteins, so why is antibody design not just the same problem as mini-binder design? In most ways they are the same. The main difference is that the CDR loops that drive antibody binding are highly variable and do not benefit directly from evolutionary information the way other binding motifs do. Folding long CDR loops correctly is especially difficult.

Here I'll review the latest antibody design tools.

It's hard to be a scientist and to be authentic in our current grant-funding race.

This paper is a big deal. I appreciate the laborious efforts the authors underwent to calculate a more accurate infection fatality rate (IFR). The IFR is the number of deaths from a disease divided by the total number of cases. If 10 people die of the disease, and 500 actually have it, then the IFR is [10 / 500], or 2%.

The IFR is different for age-stratified groups. The IFR was calculated before COVID-19 vaccination became widely available.

It's a big deal because it reports a markedly lower COVID-19 IFR than previous studies. The panic may not have been warranted for non-elderly age groups. I read this to also mean that the risks to adolescents did not warrant school closures and for some ages vaccination, even though vaccination risks for this age group were minimal.

"...in many locations excessive hospitalizations may have been driven by irrationally high perceptions of IFR for non-elderly people and they may have caused unnecessary stress and damage to the health care system at large."