Synthetic Tuning of Domain Stoichiometry in Nanobody-Enzyme Megamolecules

This paper presents a method to synthetically tune atomically precise megamolecule nanobody-enzyme conjugates for prodrug cancer therapy. Previous efforts to create heterobifunctional protein conjugates suffered from heterogeneity in domain stoichiometry, which in part led to the failure of antibody-enzyme conjugates in clinical trials. We used the megamolecule approach to synthesize anti-HER2 nanobody-cytosine deaminase conjugates with tunable numbers of nanobody and enzyme domains in a single, covalent molecule. Linking two nanobody domains to one enzyme domain improved avidity to a human cancer cell line by 4-fold but did not increase cytotoxicity significantly due to lowered enzyme activity. In contrast, a megamolecule composed of one nanobody and two enzyme domains resulted in an 8-fold improvement in the catalytic efficiency and increased the cytotoxic effect by over 5-fold in spheroid culture, indicating that the multimeric structure allowed for an increase in local drug activation. Our work demonstrates that the megamolecule strategy can be used to study structure-function relationships of protein conjugate therapeutics with synthetic control of protein domain stoichiometry.