Characterizing and Quantitating Therapeutic Tethered Multimeric Antibody Degradation Using Affinity Capture Mass Spectrometry

Abstract

There are many pharmacokinetic challenges associated with administering protein therapeutics, including biotransformation via clipping, deamidation, isomerization, oxidation, etc. In the case of engineered multivalent tethered antibody formats, proteolysis or deconjugation at the fusion or conjugation site present further issues. Unlike degradations associated with antibody drug conjugates, such biotransformations of tethered antibody formats usually result in degraded products with large mass differences. These large differences can result in processing or mass spectrometry response bias among the resulting product species that can lead to inaccurate stability quantitation. Herein, we describe an assay strategy for characterizing and quantitating degradations accurately for multivalent antibodies by incorporating response bias corrections. For the multivalent tethered antibody molecules selected, an similar to 30-80% difference in response, compared to the cleaved product, was observed. To correct for the response bias, selected tethered multivalent antibodies and an IgG antibody (representing the stable intact and the degraded product species, respectively) were spiked in serum at known ratios for analysis. Following affinity capture, we generated calibration curves (five-parameter logistic fit p < 0.05) by plotting the measured ratios of the MS ion responses against the known spiked-in ratios (CVs < 8% for calibration standards). The qualified calibration curve (accuracy within 8% and 2% for measuring degradations of 5% and 15% product, respectively) was then used, through interpolation, to determine stability profiles for the same multivalent tethered antibody formats from both in vitro serum and pharmacokinetic study samples.