Universal Automated Immunoaffinity Purification-CE-MS Platform for Accelerating Next Generation Biologic Design

As the pharmaceutical industry places greater emphasis on pairing biological pathways with appropriate therapeutic intervention, an increase in the use of biologic drugs has emerged. With increasing complexity of biotherapeutics, absorption, distribution, metabolism, and excretion (ADME) studies have also become increasingly complex. The characterization of ADME properties is critical to tuning the pharmacokinetic profiles of next generation biologics (NGBs). The knowledge of the fate of a drug is essential for the enhancement of the design processes, elongation of exposure at the desired site of action, and achieving efficacy with minimum toxicity. In vivo proteolytic cleavage of biotherapeutics may lead to undesirable in vivo properties, such as rapid clearance, low bioavailability, and loss of pharmacodynamic effect. All of these may affect drug efficacy and/or generate safety concerns through increases in immunogenicity or off-target toxicity. The work herein describes the development of a robust, fully automated immunoaffinity purification (IA)-capillary electrophoresis-mass spectrometry (CE-MS) workflow. The reagents were carefully optimized to maximize isolation yields while minimizing the number of experimental steps to analytical results. The result is the development of a comprehensive integrated platform for the characterization of a wide range of biotherapeutics, including peptibodies, monoclonal antibodies, and bispecific antibodies. Empowered by this automated IA-CE-MS approach, implementing biotransformation studies at an early drug discovery stage can speed up the drug development process.