Two-Dimensional Capillary Zone Electrophoresis-Mass Spectrometry: Intact mAb Charge Variant Separation Followed by Peptide Level Analysis Using In-Capillary Digestion

What should next-generation analytical platforms for biopharmaceutical production look like?

Biotherapeutic products, particularly complex products such as monoclonal antibodies (mAbs), have as many as 20-30 critical quality attributes (CQAs), thereby requiring a collection of orthogonal, high-resolution analytical tools for characterization and making characterization a resource-intensive task. As discussed in this Opinion, the need to reduce the cost of developing biotherapeutic products and the need to adopt Industry 4.0 and eventually Industry 5.0 paradigms are driving a reappraisal of existing analytical platforms. Next-generation platforms will have reduced offline testing, renewed focus on online testing and real-time monitoring, multiattribute monitoring, and extensive use of advanced data analytics and automation. They will be more complex, more sensitive, resource lean, and more responsive compared with existing platforms.

Multi-dimensional technology - Recent advances and applications for biotherapeutic characterization

This review provides an overview of the latest advancements and applications in multi-dimensional liquid chromatography coupled with mass spectrometry (mD-LC-MS), covering aspects such as inter-laboratory studies, digestion strategy, trapping column, and multi-level analysis. The shift from an offline to an online workflow reduces sample processing artifacts, analytical variability, analysis time, and the labor required for data acquisition. Over the past few years, this technique has demonstrated sufficient maturity for application across a diverse range of complex products. Moreover, there is potential for this strategy to evolve into an integrated process analytical technology tool for the real-time monitoring of monoclonal antibody quality. This review also identifies emerging trends, including its application to new modalities, the possibility of evaluating biological activity within the mD-LC set-up, and the consideration of multi-dimensional capillary electrophoresis as an alternative to mD-LC. As mD-LC-MS continues to evolve and integrate emerging trends, it holds the potential to shape the next generation of analytical tools, offering exciting possibilities for enhanced characterization and monitoring of complex biopharmaceutical products.

Recent developments in capillary and microchip electroseparations of peptides (2021-mid-2023)

This review article brings a comprehensive survey of developments and applications of high-performance capillary and microchip electromigration methods (zone electrophoresis in a free solution or in sieving media, isotachophoresis, isoelectric focusing, affinity electrophoresis, electrokinetic chromatography, and electrochromatography) for analysis, micropreparation, and physicochemical characterization of peptides in the period from 2021 up to ca. the middle of 2023. Progress in the study of electromigration properties of peptides and various aspects of their analysis, such as sample preparation, adsorption suppression, electroosmotic flow regulation, and detection, are presented. New developments in the particular capillary electromigration methods are demonstrated, and several types of their applications are reported. They cover qualitative and quantitative analysis of synthetic or isolated peptides and determination of peptides in complex biomatrices, peptide profiling of biofluids and tissues, and monitoring of chemical and enzymatic reactions and physicochemical changes of peptides. They include also amino acid and sequence analysis of peptides, peptide mapping of proteins, separation of stereoisomers of peptides, and their chiral analyses. In addition, micropreparative separations and physicochemical characterization of peptides and their interactions with other (bio)molecules by the above CE methods are described.

Sample transformation in online separations: how chemical conversion advances analytical technology

While the advent of modern analytical technology has allowed scientists to determine the complexity of mixtures, it also spurred the demand to understand these sophisticated mixtures better. Chemical transformation can be used to provide insights into properties of complex samples such as degradation pathways or molecular heterogeneity that are otherwise unaccessible. In this article, we explore how sample transformation is exploited across different application fields to empower analytical methods. Transformation mechanisms include molecular-weight reduction, controlled degradation, and derivatization. Both offline and online transformation methods have been explored. The covered studies show that sample transformation facilitates faster reactions (e.g. several hours to minutes), reduces sample complexity, unlocks new sample dimensions (e.g. functional groups), provides correlations between multiple sample dimensions, and improves detectability. The article highlights the state-of-the-art and future prospects, focusing in particular on the characterization of protein and nucleic-acid therapeutics, nanoparticles, synthetic polymers, and small molecules.

Strategies for capillary electrophoresis: Method development and validation for pharmaceutical and biological applications-Updated and completely revised edition

This review is in support of the development of selective, precise, fast, and validated capillary electrophoresis (CE) methods. It follows up a similar article from 1998, Wätzig H, Degenhardt M, Kunkel A. "Strategies for capillary electrophoresis: method development and validation for pharmaceutical and biological applications," pointing out which fundamentals are still valid and at the same time showing the enormous achievements in the last 25 years. The structures of both reviews are widely similar, in order to facilitate their simultaneous use. Focusing on pharmaceutical and biological applications, the successful use of CE is now demonstrated by more than 600 carefully selected references. Many of those are recent reviews; therefore, a significant overview about the field is provided. There are extra sections about sample pretreatment related to CE and microchip CE, and a completely revised section about method development for protein analytes and biomolecules in general. The general strategies for method development are summed up with regard to selectivity, efficiency, precision, analysis time, limit of detection, sample pretreatment requirements, and validation.