De novo discovery of antibody drugs - great promise demands scrutiny.

We live in an era of rapidly advancing computing capacity and algorithmic sophistication. "Big data" and "artificial intelligence"find progressively wider use in all spheres of human activity, including healthcare. A diverse array of computational technologies is being applied with increasing frequency to antibody drug research and development (R&D). Their successful applications are met with great interest due to the potential for accelerating and streamlining the antibody R&D process. While this excitement is very likely justified in the long term, it is less likely that the transition from the first use to routine practice will escape challenges that other new technologies had experienced before they began to blossom. This transition typically requires many cycles of iterative learning that rely on the deconstruction of the technology to understand its pitfalls and define vectors for optimization. The study by Vasquez et al. identifies a key obstacle to such learning: the lack of transparency regarding methodology in computational antibody design reports, which has the potential to mislead the community efforts.