Kinetics of Monoclonal Antibody Aggregation from Dilute toward Concentrated Conditions.

Gaining understanding on the aggregation behavior of proteins under concentrated conditions is of both fundamental and industrial relevance. Here, we study the aggregation kinetics of a model monoclonal antibody (mAb) under thermal stress over a wide range of protein concentrations in various buffer solutions. We follow experimentally the monomer depletion and the aggregate growth by size exclusion chromatography with inline light scattering. We describe the experimental results in the frame of a kinetic model based on population balance equations, which allows one to discriminate the contributions of the conformational and of the colloidal stabilities to the global aggregation rate. Finally, we propose an expression for the aggregation rate constant, which accounts for solution viscosity, protein-protein interactions, as well as aggregate compactness. All these effects can be quantified by light scattering techniques. It is found that the model describes well the experimental data under dilute conditions. Under concentrated conditions, good model predictions are obtained when the solution pH is far below the isoelectric point (pI) of the mAb. However, peculiar effects arise when the solution pH is increased toward the mAb pI, and possible explanations are discussed.

Viscosity scaling in concentrated dispersions and its impact on colloidal aggregation.

Gaining fundamental knowledge about diffusion in crowded environments is of great relevance in a variety of research fields, including reaction engineering, biology, pharmacy and colloid science. In this work, we determine the effective viscosity experienced by a spherical tracer particle immersed in a concentrated colloidal dispersion by means of Brownian dynamics simulations. We characterize how the effective viscosity increases from the solvent viscosity for small tracer particles to the macroscopic viscosity of the dispersion when large tracer particles are employed. Our results show that the crossover between these two regimes occurs at a tracer particle size comparable to the host particle size. In addition, it is found that data points obtained in various host dispersions collapse on one master curve when the normalized effective viscosity is plotted as a function of the ratio between the tracer particle size and the mean host particle size. In particular, this master curve was obtained by varying the volume fraction, the average size and the polydispersity of the host particle distribution. Finally, we extend these results to determine the size dependent effective viscosity experienced by a fractal cluster in a concentrated colloidal system undergoing aggregation. We include this scaling of the effective viscosity in classical aggregation kernels, and we quantify its impact on the kinetics of aggregate growth as well as on the shape of the aggregate distribution by means of population balance equation calculations.

Impact of aggregate formation on the viscosity of protein solutions.

Gaining knowledge on the stability and viscosity of concentrated therapeutic protein solutions is of great relevance to the pharmaceutical industry. In this work, we borrow key concepts from colloid science to rationalize the impact of aggregate formation on the changes in viscosity of a concentrated monoclonal antibody solution. In particular, we monitor the kinetics of aggregate growth under thermal stress by static and dynamic light scattering, and we follow the rise in solution viscosity by measuring the diffusion coefficient of tracer nanoparticles with dynamic light scattering. Moreover, we characterize aggregate morphology in the frame of the fractal geometry. We show that the curves of the increase in viscosity with time monitored at three different protein concentrations collapse on one single master curve when the reaction profiles are normalized based on an effective volume fraction occupied by the aggregates, which depends on the aggregate size, concentration and morphology. Importantly, we find that the viscosity of an aggregate sample is lower than the viscosity of a monomeric sample of a similar occupied volume fraction due to the polydispersity of the aggregate distribution.

Fragmentation of amyloid fibrils occurs in preferential positions depending on the environmental conditions.

Understanding the mechanism of amyloid fibril breakage is of fundamental importance in various research fields including biomedicine and bionanotechnology. The aim of this work is to clarify the impact of temperature and agitation speed on the fibril breakage rate constant, which depends both on the fibril length as well as on the position of fragmentation along the fibril longitudinal axis. In particular, we intend to discriminate between three fibril fragmentation mechanisms: erosion (i.e., breakage occurs preferentially at the ends of the fibril), random (i.e., breakage occurs with the same likelihood at any position), or central (i.e., breakage occurs preferentially at the center of the fibril). To do so, we compare the time evolution of the fibril length distribution followed with atomic force microscopy with simulations from a kinetic model based on population balance equations (PBE). In this frame, we investigate the breakage mechanism of insulin fibrils, which turns out to be affected by the operative conditions employed. Moreover, we compare our findings with literature data obtained with ß-lactoglobulin and ß2-microglobulin. It is observed that high temperature drives the breakage toward an erosion mechanism, while a high agitation rate rather induces a central breakage.

A multiscale view of therapeutic protein aggregation: a colloid science perspective.

The formation of aggregates in protein-based pharmaceuticals is a major issue that can compromise drug safety and drug efficacy. With a view to improving protein stability, considerable effort is put forth to unravel the fundamental mechanisms underlying the aggregation process. However, therapeutic protein aggregation is a complex multistep phenomenon that involves time and length scales spanning several orders of magnitude, and strategies addressing protein aggregation inhibition are currently still largely empirical in practice. Here, we review how key concepts developed in the frame of colloid science can be applied to gain knowledge on the kinetics and thermodynamics of therapeutic protein aggregation across different length scales. In particular, we discuss the use of coarse-grained molecular interaction potentials to quantify protein colloidal stability. We then show how population balance equations simulations can provide insights into the mechanisms of aggregate formation at the mesoscale, and we highlight the strength of the concept of fractal scaling to quantify irregular aggregate morphologies. Finally, we correlate the macroscopic rheological properties of protein solutions with the occupied volume fraction and the aggregate structure. Overall, this work illustrates the power and limitations of colloidal approaches in the multiscale description of the aggregation of therapeutic proteins.

Effect of polyol sugars on the stabilization of monoclonal antibodies.

We investigate the impact of sugars and polyols on the heat-induced aggregation of a model monoclonal antibody whose monomer depletion is rate-limited by protein unfolding. We follow the kinetics of monomer consumption by size exclusion chromatography, and we interpret the results in the frame of two mechanistic schemes describing the enhanced protein stability in the presence of polyols. It is found that the stabilization effect increases with increasing polyol concentration with a comparable trend for all of the tested polyols. However, the stabilization effect at a given polyol concentration is polyol specific. In particular, the stabilization effect increases as a function of polyol size until a plateau is reached above a critical polyol size corresponding to six carbon atoms. Our results show that the stabilization by polyols does not depend solely on the volume fraction filled by the polyol molecules, but is also affected by the polyol chemistry.

Role of cosolutes in the aggregation kinetics of monoclonal antibodies.

We propose a general strategy based on kinetic analysis to investigate how cosolutes affect the aggregation behavior of therapeutic proteins. We apply this approach to study the impact of NaCl and sorbitol on the aggregation kinetics of two monoclonal antibodies, an IgG1 and an IgG2. By using a combination of size exclusion chromatography and light scattering techniques, we study the impact of the cosolutes on the monomer depletion, as well as on the formation of dimers, trimers, and larger aggregates. We analyze these macroscopic effects in the frame of a kinetic model based on Smoluchowski's population balance equations modified to account for nucleation events. By comparing experimental data with model simulations, we discriminate the effect of cosolutes on the elementary steps which contribute to the global aggregation process. In the case of the IgG1, it is found that NaCl accelerates the kinetics of aggregation by promoting specifically aggregation events, while sorbitol delays the kinetics of aggregation by specifically inhibiting protein unfolding. In the case of the IgG2, whose monomer depletion kinetics is limited by dimer formation, NaCl and sorbitol are found respectively to accelerate and inhibit conformational changes and aggregation events to the same extent.

Kinetic analysis of the multistep aggregation mechanism of monoclonal antibodies.

We investigate by kinetic analysis the aggregation mechanism of two monoclonal antibodies belonging to the IgG1 and IgG2 subclass under thermal stress. For each IgG, we apply a combination of size exclusion chromatography and light scattering techniques to resolve the time evolution of the monomer, dimer, and trimer concentrations, as well as the average molecular weight and the average hydrodynamic radius of the aggregate distribution. By combining the detailed experimental characterization with a theoretical kinetic model based on population balance equations, we extract relevant information on the contribution of the individual elementary steps on the global aggregation process. The analysis shows that the two molecules follow different aggregation pathways under the same operating conditions. In particular, while the monomer depletion of the IgG1 is found to be rate-limited by monomeric conformational changes, bimolecular collision is identified as the rate-limiting step in the IgG2 aggregation process. The measurement of the microscopic rate constants by kinetic analysis allows the quantification of the protein-protein interaction potentials expressed in terms of the Fuchs stability ratio (W). It is found that the antibody solutions exhibit large W values, which are several orders of magnitude larger than the values computed in the frame of the DLVO theory. This indicates that, besides net electrostatic repulsion, additional effects delay the aggregation kinetics of the antibody solutions with respect to diffusion-limited conditions. These effects likely include the limited efficiency of the collision events due to the presence of a limited number of specific aggregation-prone patches on the heterogeneous protein surface, and the contribution of additional repulsive non-DLVO forces to the protein-protein interaction potential, such as hydration forces.

The presence of an air-water interface affects formation and elongation of α-Synuclein fibrils.

The aggregation of human α-Synuclein (α-Syn) into amyloid fibrils is related to the onset of multiple diseases termed synucleinopathies. Substantial evidence suggests that hydrophobic-hydrophilic interfaces promote the aggregation of amyloidogenic proteins and peptides in vitro. In this work the effect of the air-water interface (AWI) on α-Syn aggregation is investigated by means of thioflavin T binding measurements, dynamic light scattering, size-exclusion chromatography, electron microscopy, and atomic force microscopy. Measurements were performed with the monomeric protein alone or together with preformed seeds. In presence of the AWI, α-Syn aggregates readily into amyloid fibrils that remain adsorbed to the AWI. Instead, when the AWI is removed from the samples by replacing it with a solid-liquid interface, the interfacial aggregation of monomeric α-Syn is greatly reduced and no significant increase in ThT fluorescence is detected in the bulk, even at 900 µM concentration. Bulk aggregation is observed only when a sufficient amount of preformed seeds is added, and the initial slope of the kinetics scales with the amount of seeds as expected for first order kinetics. By contrast, in seeded experiments with the AWI, the initial slope is one order of magnitude lower and secondary nucleation pathways appear instead to be dominant. Thus, interfaces play multiple roles in the aggregation of α-Syn, influencing primary nucleation, aggregate elongation, and secondary nucleation processes. Interfacial effects must therefore be taken into account to achieve a complete understanding of protein aggregation events in vitro as well as in vivo.