title: Tabhu: tools for antibody humanization.
abstract: CONCLUSIONS
  Antibodies are rapidly becoming essential tools in the clinical practice, given their ability to recognize their cognate antigens with high specificity and affinity, and a high yield at reasonable costs in model animals. Unfortunately, when administered to human patients, xenogeneic antibodies can elicit unwanted and dangerous immunogenic responses. Antibody humanization methods are designed to produce molecules with a better safety profile still maintaining their ability to bind the antigen. This can be accomplished by grafting the non-human regions determining the antigen specificity into a suitable human template. Unfortunately, this procedure may results in a partial or complete loss of affinity of the grafted molecule that can be restored by back-mutating some of the residues of human origin to the corresponding murine ones. This trial-and-error procedure is hard and involves expensive and time-consuming experiments. Here we present tools for antibody humanization (Tabhu) a web server for antibody humanization. Tabhu includes tools for human template selection, grafting, back-mutation evaluation, antibody modelling and structural analysis, helping the user in all the critical steps of the humanization experiment protocol.
  
  
  BACKGROUND
  http://www.biocomputing.it/tabhu
  
  
  BACKGROUND
  anna.tramontano@uniroma1.it, pierpaolo.olimpieri@uniroma1.it
  
  
  BACKGROUND
  Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.
authors.affiliation: Department of Physics, Sapienza University, Rome 00185, Italy, Center for Biological Sequence Analysis, Department of Systems Biology, Technical University of Denmark, Anker Engelunds Vej 1, 2800 Lyngby, Denmark and Istituto Pasteur-Fondazione Cenci Bolognetti, Rome 00185, Italy.
authors.forename: Pier Paolo
authors.initials: PP
authors.lastname: Olimpieri
authors.affiliation: Department of Physics, Sapienza University, Rome 00185, Italy, Center for Biological Sequence Analysis, Department of Systems Biology, Technical University of Denmark, Anker Engelunds Vej 1, 2800 Lyngby, Denmark and Istituto Pasteur-Fondazione Cenci Bolognetti, Rome 00185, Italy.
authors.forename: Paolo
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Marcatili
authors.affiliation: Department of Physics, Sapienza University, Rome 00185, Italy, Center for Biological Sequence Analysis, Department of Systems Biology, Technical University of Denmark, Anker Engelunds Vej 1, 2800 Lyngby, Denmark and Istituto Pasteur-Fondazione Cenci Bolognetti, Rome 00185, Italy Department of Physics, Sapienza University, Rome 00185, Italy, Center for Biological Sequence Analysis, Department of Systems Biology, Technical University of Denmark, Anker Engelunds Vej 1, 2800 Lyngby, Denmark and Istituto Pasteur-Fondazione Cenci Bolognetti, Rome 00185, Italy.
authors.forename: Anna
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Tramontano
mesh_terms: D000818:Animals; D000911:Antibodies, Monoclonal / Q000235:genetics / Q000276:immunology*; D000918:Antibody Specificity / Q000235:genetics*; D000936:Antigen-Antibody Complex / Q000737:chemistry*; D000941:Antigens / Q000276:immunology*; D006801:Humans; D051379:Mice; D015202:Protein Engineering / Q000379:methods*; D012984:Software
chemical_list: D000911:Antibodies, Monoclonal; D000936:Antigen-Antibody Complex; D000941:Antigens