Articles tagged ”Middle-up”
FabRICATOR® in Middle-Up Quantitative N-Glycan Profiling of Therapeutic Monoclonal Antibodies
A middle-level approach to glycan characterisation is described in this paper by scientists at the University of Geneva and collaborators. FabRICATOR (IdeS), a critical tool in this study, is used to generate Fd’, LC and the glycan-containing Fc subunits, which can be chromatographically separated using HILIC and characterised using mass spectrometry.
Read more »

Middle-up Analysis of Monoclonal Antibodies using FabRICATOR®
With their molecular specificity for biological targets, monoclonal antibodies (mAbs) have revolutionized the field of research and medicine. Due to numerous post-translational modifications causing heterogeneity in the structure of mAbs, a comprehensive characterization of the physiochemical properties is necessary to ensure the quality, efficacy and safety of mAb-based therapeutic drugs.
Read more »

GlyCLICK® and Middle-up LC-MS Enables Robust ADC Development
Scientists at the University of Geneva and CNRS present site-specific ADCs generated using the GlyCLICK technology and an analytical middle-up LC-HRMS workflow as a potential core module for ADC development.
Antibody-drug conjugates (ADCs) are efficient therapeutic agents that possess the cell-targeting properties of monoclonal antibodies combined with the potency of cytotoxic drugs. Early generation ADCs were predominantly obtained through non-selective conjugation methods by incorporation of a drug payload at randomly distributed sites. Such methods result in highly heterogenous subpopulations of varying antibody-drug ratio (DAR) leading to potential loss of efficacy and impaired pharmacokinetics. While alternative strategies exploring genetic engineering have emerged for conjugation at non-natural amino acids, challenges related to both production and analytical characterization persist.
Glycan-mediated bioconjugation using the GlyCLICK technology is an attractive option to overcome the challenges of conventional bioconjugation without the need for genetic engineering to produce custom ADCs. By utilizing a unique combination of enzymes, the conserved Fc-glycans are remodeled and site-specifically conjugated using click chemistry for ADCs carrying two payloads per antibody (DAR=2.0) having controlled drug stoichiometry and preserved immunoreactivity. In this paper, Duivelshof et al. developed a site-specific ADC by coupling trastuzumab to DM1 using the GlyCLICK technology and evaluated the quality of the conjugation process using complementary reversed phase (RPLC) and hydrophilic interaction chromatography (HILIC) coupled to high-resolution mass spectrometry (HRMS).
The trastuzumab antibody was site-specifically conjugated to DBCO-functionalized DM1 (DBCO-PEG4-Ahx-DM1) using the GlyCLICK technology. To reduce sample complexity, the antibodies were digested with FabRICATOR® (Ides) or FabALACTICA® (IgdE) and reduced for comparison of native and GlyCLICK conjugated trastuzumab at the subunit level. The complementary HILIC and RPLC workflow allowed the authors to observe the significant shift in retention between the lipophilic drug payloads on the ADC and the hydrophilic N-glycans on native trastuzumab. These results enabled the scientists to confirm site-specific conjugation at the Fc-glycans sites, while hyphenation to HRMS detection allowed accurate determination of a DAR of 2.0 for GlyCLICK conjugated trastuzumab, which was not possible at the intact ADC level.
“Most ADCs are produced with non-selective bioconjugation of drug payloads to lysine or cysteine residues creating a wide variety of drug-antibody ratios (DAR). In the frame of new ADC product development, we believe that having control over the DAR and drug load distribution (DLD) is of crucial importance, as is the ability to accurately monitor these two CQAs. Therefore, the combination of the GlyCLICK technology to create homogeneous site-specific ADCs with the middle-up LC/HRMS approach to rapidly determine both the DLD and DAR has a great potential for ADC development.”
ADC Subunit Characterization of Drug Load and Glycosylation using HILIC-MS
In a collaboration headed by Davy Guillarme at University of Geneva, scientists have explored the characterization of subunits derived from antibody drug conjugates (ADCs) using hydrophilic interaction chromatography (HILIC) coupled to mass spectrometry (D’Atri et al. 2018).
The scientists used brentuximab vedotin (BV, Adcetris®), an approved ADC for treatment of Hodgkin lymphoma (HL) and systemic anaplastic large cell lymphoma (ALCL). The BV consists of an antibody directed towards CD30, coupled to the vedotin toxin using cysteine conjugation chemistry. The random cysteine conjugation method results in a heterogeneous attachment of the drug, with differences in efficacy depending on the drug load. For this reason, the amount of conjugated toxins requires careful characterization. A key quality attribute of both antibodies and ADCs is the glycosylation profile, that may affect the stability, efficacy and safety. In this paper, a method to study ADC drug load and glycan profiling in a single experiment was demonstrated.
The intact ADC is around 150 kDa, which makes it very complicated to study details with high resolution. For this reason, D’Atri and colleagues used FabRICATOR digestion and reduction to generate specific antibody subunits of around 25 kDa, with increased resolution in both separation and mass determination. New wide-pore HILIC phase has enabled separation of larger molecules such as antibody subunits, and the team has already published a glycoprofiling strategy using HILIC on naked antibodies (Periat et al. 2016).
The coupling of HILIC separation to MS of subunits resulted in more detailed characterization of the subunits as compared to reverse phase separation (RP-HPLC). The relative percentage of each subunit aligned well with both methods of separation. However, additional positional isomers of the Fd’ fragment were observed using HILIC separation. Also, the glycoforms of the Fc/2 fragments were chromatographically separated, making mass deconvolution and determination easier. The authors conclude the middle-up HILIC-MS method to be orthogonal to RP-MS with the benefit that the methodology allows simultaneous characterization of drug load and glycosylation of the antibody drug conjugate.
FabRICATOR is a protease with a single digestion site below the hinge of IgG. The enzyme is widely used in middle-level analytical workflows for characterization of antibody based biopharmaceuticals. Learn more about FabRICATOR.
References
Periat, A. et al., 2016. Potential of hydrophilic interaction chromatography for the analytical characterization of protein biopharmaceuticals. Journal of chromatography. A, 1448, pp.81–92.