Cross-interaction chromatography as a rapid screening technique to identify the stability of new antibody therapeutics.

Protein aggregation can be a major problem in the manufacturing of new biopharmaceuticals and there is a desirability for development of techniques that can predict the behaviour of new biopharmaceuticals early on in the development process. A technique that can be used to predict aggregation is self-interaction chromatography that is used to determine the second virial coefficient, B22, but one of the limitations includes the need to immobilise every protein of interest. In this study a related technique, cross interaction chromatography (CIC), is evaluated which overcomes this limitation. Three antibodies were studied across a range of NaCl concentrations with each antibody being studied as both a mobile phase and as the stationary phase - in total 6 different stationary-mobile phase combinations. The B22 values obtained for all three proteins correlated strongly with the B23 results obtained for the same protein in the mobile phase, and were significantly independent of the protein immobilised on the stationary phase. This observation allows the use of pre-prepared columns with known immobilised model proteins such as a polyclonal antibody or mAb, with other unknown monoclonal antibodies in the mobile phase. Preliminary experiments using a series of known immobilised mAbs columns with an unknown mAb in the mobile phase resulted in at least a 50 fold reduction in the amount of unknown protein needed and a rapid semi-quantitative assessment of aggregation propensity. CIC can speed up the screening process with minimum preparation time and therefore more rapidly be able to identify the aggregation stability of new antibody formulations.

Mapping the mAb Aggregation Propensity Using Self-Interaction Chromatography as a Screening Tool.

The osmotic second virial coefficient ( B2), which describes protein-protein molecular interactions in solution, was determined using self-interaction chromatography (SIC) for an IgG1-type mAb across a wide range of solution conditions. These data were compared with its time dependent aggregation behavior, as determined using size-exclusion chromatography (SEC), and its temperature dependent aggregation behavior using dynamic light scattering (DLS) over a four-week period (SEC) or overnight (DLS). DLS and SEC gave consistent data on aggregation behavior, which correlated well with experimental B2 trends across the wide pH (4-9) and NaCl concentration (0-1.0 M) ranges studied. The IgG aggregated at pH 4 for 0.5-1.0 M NaCl concentrations and for 0 M NaCl concentrations at pH 8. Best stability against aggregation was exhibited for the pH range from 5 to 8 at 0.8-1.0 M NaCl. SIC data were able to be classified within the one-day solution conditions for aggregation, which were not identified for 2-3 weeks in the accelerated SEC stability study. The ability of SIC to provide such data rapidly reflects the fundamentally thermodynamic nature of this parameter and of the aggregation process itself. Proteins with attractive protein-protein interactions and negative B2 coefficients in the range -3 to -6 clearly exhibit aggregation behavior, while B2 values in the range 0 to 2 showed good stability toward aggregation. SIC allows the rapid screening of solution conditions for which mAbs will exhibit stability to aggregation while requiring 90% less time and material compared with that required for a conventional SEC aggregation study.