Papers › Vaxformer: Antigenicity-controlled Transformer for Vaccine Design Against SARS-CoV-2

Vaxformer: Antigenicity-controlled Transformer for Vaccine Design Against SARS-CoV-2

18 May 2023arXiv:2305.11194archive 2025-07-28

Aryo Pradipta Gema, Michał Kobiela, Achille Fraisse, Ajitha Rajan, Diego A. Oyarzún, Javier Antonio Alfaro

The SARS-CoV-2 pandemic has emphasised the importance of developing a universal vaccine that can protect against current and future variants of the virus. The present study proposes a novel conditional protein Language Model architecture, called Vaxformer, which is designed to produce natural-looking antigenicity-controlled SARS-CoV-2 spike proteins. We evaluate the generated protein sequences of the Vaxformer model using DDGun protein stability measure, netMHCpan antigenicity score, and a structure fidelity score with AlphaFold to gauge its viability for vaccine development. Our results show that Vaxformer outperforms the existing state-of-the-art Conditional Variational Autoencoder model to generate antigenicity-controlled SARS-CoV-2 spike proteins. These findings suggest promising opportunities for conditional Transformer models to expand our understanding of vaccine design and their role in mitigating global health challenges. The code used in this study is available at https://github.com/aryopg/vaxformer .

PaperPDFCode

Code

aryopg/vaxformer officialmentioned in papermentioned on GitHubpytorch report

Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.

Code Syntology ran Syntology

Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.

Tasks

Language ModelingLanguage ModellingProtein Language Model

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.

Methods

Absolute Position EncodingsAdamAlphaFoldAttentionBPEDense ConnectionsDropoutLabel SmoothingLayer NormalizationLinear LayerMulti-Head AttentionPosition-Wise Feed-Forward LayerResidual ConnectionSoftmaxTransformer

Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections