Automated high-throughput buffer exchange platform enhances rapid flow analysis of antibody drug conjugates by high resolution mass spectrometry.

Antibody drug conjugates (ADCs) are an increasingly important therapeutic class of molecules for the treatment of cancer. Average drug-to-antibody ratio (DAR) and drug-load distribution are critical quality attributes of ADCs with the potential to impact efficacy and toxicity of the molecule and need to be analytically characterized and understood. Several platform methods including hydrophobic interaction chromatography (HIC) and native size-exclusion chromatography-mass spectrometry (nSEC-MS) have been developed for that purpose; however, each presents some limitations. In this work, we assessed a new sample preparation and buffer exchange platform coupled with high-resolution mass spectrometry for characterizing the drug-load and distribution of several cysteine-linked ADCs conjugated with a variety of chemotypes. Several criteria were evaluated during the optimization of the buffer exchange-mass spectrometry system performance and the data generated with the system were compared with results from nSEC-MS and HIC. The results indicated that the platform enables automated and high throughput quantitative DAR characterization for antibody-drug conjugates with high reproducibility and offers several key advantages over existing approaches that are used for chemotype-agnostic ADC characterization.

Evidence for co-translational misincorporation of non-canonical amino acid hydroxyproline in recombinant antibodies produced in Chinese Hamster Ovary (CHO) cell lines.

With the advent of highly sensitive technologies such as tandem mass spectrometry and next-generation sequencing, recombinant antibodies are now routinely analyzed for the presence of low-level sequence variants including amino acid misincorporations. During mAb cell culture process development, we found that proline was replaced with the non-canonical amino acid, hydroxyproline, in the protein sequence. We investigated the relationship between proline content in the cell culture media and proline sequence variants and found that the proline concentration was inversely correlated with the amount of sequence variants detected in the protein sequence. Hydroxyproline incorporation has been previously reported in recombinant proteins produced in mammalian expression systems as a post-translational modification. Given the dependency on proline levels, the mechanism was then investigated. To address the possibility of co-translational misincorporation of hydroxyproline, we used tandem mass spectrometry to measure incorporation of stable-isotope labelled hydroxyproline added to the feed of a production bioreactor. We discovered co-translational misincorporation of labelled hydroxyproline in the recombinant antibody. These findings are significant, since they underscore the need to track non-canonical amino acid incorporation as a co-translational event in CHO cells. Understanding the mechanism of hydroxyproline incorporation is crucial in developing an appropriate control strategy during biologics production.

Comparison of SEC and CE-SDS methods for monitoring hinge fragmentation in IgG1 monoclonal antibodies.

Fragmentation of monoclonal antibodies is a critical quality attribute routinely monitored to assess the purity and integrity of the product from development to commercialization. Cleavage in the upper hinge region of IgG1 monoclonal antibodies is a common fragmentation pattern widely studied by size exclusion chromatography (SEC). Capillary electrophoresis with sodium dodecylsulfate (CE-SDS) is a well-established technique commonly used for monitoring antibody fragments as well, but its comparability to SEC in monitoring hinge fragments has not been established until now. We report a characterization strategy that establishes the correlation between hinge region fragments analyzed by SEC and CE-SDS. Monoclonal antibodies with elevated hinge fragments were generated under low pH stress conditions and analyzed by SEC and CE-SDS. The masses of the fragments generated were determined by LC-MS. Electrophoretic migration of the hinge fragmentation products in CE-SDS were determined based on their mass values. Comparative assessment of fragments by SEC, and CE-SDS showed similar correlation with incubation time. This study demonstrates that CE-SDS can be employed as a surrogate technique to SEC for monitoring hinge region fragments. Most importantly, combination of these techniques can be used to obtain comprehensive understanding of fragment related characteristics of therapeutic protein products.