Nona Biosciences Debuts HCAbLM, First AI Model for Human HCAbs
Cambridge – September 19, 2026 -- Nona Biosciences has developed HCAbLM, the first language model trained specifically on fully human heavy-chain-only antibodies (HCAbs), built from a dataset of 31.8 million HCAb sequences drawn from 73 independently immunized transgenic mice. The findings were detailed in a study titled "A foundation model learns the sequence and functional grammar of fully human heavy-chain-only antibodies," published on bioRxiv.
Nona targets the developability bottleneck in AI antibody design
Current AI antibody discovery is limited less by target-binding design than by manufacturability at scale, aggregation risk and stability -- collectively known as developability. HCAbLM was built to learn the underlying sequence grammar that determines whether an HCAb can fold correctly and progress into a viable drug candidate. General-purpose protein models lack this capability because their training data contain almost no HCAb sequences.
