Development of anti-drug monoclonal antibody panels against adalimumab and infliximab

The generation of anti-drug antibodies (ADAs) is one of the most serious problems in therapy using monoclonal antibodies (mAbs), because ADAs can impact the pharmacokinetics, efficacy, and safety of mAbs. It is therefore important to detect the generated ADAs in patients. For the appropriate detection of ADAs, methods that detect various types of ADAs (e.g., low- and high-affinity ADAs) are needed, but since there are no adequate reference preparations of ADAs relevant to human ADAs in most cases, it is difficult to determine whether or not the developed methods have enough analytical performance. Here, we developed human-rat chimeric ADA panels against the anti-TNF-α therapeutic antibodies infliximab and adalimumab. The developed ADA panels consist of 7 (for infliximab) and 11 (for adalimumab) ADAs with various binding characters, and most of the ADAs are neutralizing antibodies. Using these ADA panels, we compared the detectability of model methods, i.e., binding assays using SPR, BLI, and ECL, and a cell-based assay to detect neutralization activity. Since we obtained ADAs showing low and high responses with the various methods, the ADA panels we developed were shown to be useful for the development of ADA assays.