When you get sick, your body mobilizes to attack. Tiny cells and antibodies that act like soldiers in your body fight the good fight to keep you healthy. But these fighters sometimes need help because they don’t have the information they need to win every fight. In the 1970s, scientists made huge breakthroughs in antibody research and created the first monoclonal antibodies (mAbs). These lab-created antibodies are special because they can be “trained” to fight specific diseases, but they’re difficult to administer for a number of reasons, one being that your body will fight the mAbs, considering them to be dangerous invaders.
Researchers have continued to develop ways to overcome these obstacles and have been very successful. Today, some mAbs are used in cancer therapies and in treating autoimmune diseases. However, it’s still difficult to get the mAbs where they need to go in the body to work effectively, so research continues in the hopes that newer techniques will help deliver these treatments to the disease site. This is especially important because the treatments are expensive, and losing 20 to 40% of the medicine as it travels through the body only exacerbates the issue.
Mario de Lucio Alonso, a graduate student in the laboratory of Professor Hector Gomez at Purdue University, has been using Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center’s (PSC) Bridges-2 supercomputer, a resource allocated through ACCESS, to run simulations of mAbs. They studied one of the more popular ways to administer mAbs – via subcutaneous injection – to see if they could find an optimal way to use the treatment.
“Subcutaneous injection of monoclonal antibodies has become one of the fastest growing fields in the pharmaceutical industry,” said De Lucio, “Monoclonal antibodies can be used to treat diseases such as cancer, arthritis, and even COVID-19. But despite this growth, there is a limited understanding of how tissue mechanics and physiological parameters, such as body mass index (BMI), flow rate, injection, depth, affect the way the drug is delivered into the body and absorbed by the lymphatic system.”
For this problem, we ran three-dimensional simulations using computational meshes over numerous time steps as we analyze the problem from short-term intervals – ranging from five to 10 seconds – up to long-term durations of hours or even days. So without [Bridges-2], it would be impossible – not doable in months, even years, to run one simulation.
—Mario de Lucio Alonso, Purdue University
Are you new to ACCESS and curious about how the program’s resources might power your research? You can find a page tailored to your interests here. The “Researchers” landing page has a number of resources chosen specifically for researchers to help them get started with ACCESS.
For a deeper dive into this research and how HPC resources were used, you can find the original article here: Bridges-2 Simulations Uncover Better Ways to Inject Monoclonal Antibody Drugs
Resource Provider Institution(s): Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center (PSC)
Affiliations: Purdue University
Funding Agency: NSF
Grant or Allocation Number(s): MCH220014
The science story featured here was enabled by the U.S. National Science Foundation’s ACCESS program, which is supported by National Science Foundation grants #2138259, #2138286, #2138307, #2137603, and #2138296.