ABSTRACT
Monitoring of host cell proteins(HCPs)during the manufacturing of monoclonal antibodies(mAb)has become a critical requirement to provide effective and safe drug products.Enzyme-linked immunosor-bent assays are still the gold standard methods for the quantification of protein impurities.However,this technique has several limitations and does,among others,not enable the precise identification of pro-teins.In this context,mass spectrometry(MS)became an alternative and orthogonal method that de-livers qualitative and quantitative information on all identified HCPs.However,in order to be routinely implemented in biopharmaceutical companies,liquid chromatography-MS based methods still need to be standardized to provide highest sensitivity and robust and accurate quantification.Here,we present a promising MS-based analytical workflow coupling the use of an innovative quantification standard,the HCP Profiler solution,with a spectral library-based data-independent acquisition(DIA)method and strict data validation criteria.The performances of the HCP Profiler solution were compared to more con-ventional standard protein spikes and the DIA approach was benchmarked against a classical data-dependent acquisition on a series of samples produced at various stages of the manufacturing process.While we also explored spectral library-free DIA interpretation,the spectral library-based approach still showed highest accuracy and reproducibility(coefficients of variation＜10％)with a sensitivity down to the sub-ng/mg mAb level.Thus,this workflow is today mature to be used as a robust and straightforward method to support mAb manufacturing process developments and drug products quality control.