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Wang T, Huang ZA, Zhou M, Wang R, Li Y, Guo L, Cao X, Huang J. Drug deconjugation-assisted peptide mapping by LC-MS/MS to identify conjugation sites and quantify site occupancy for antibody-drug conjugates. J Pharm Biomed Anal 2024; 243:116098. [PMID: 38493753 DOI: 10.1016/j.jpba.2024.116098] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [What about the content of this article? (0)] [Affiliation(s)] [Abstract] [Key Words] [MESH Headings] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 12/30/2023] [Revised: 02/22/2024] [Accepted: 03/06/2024] [Indexed: 03/19/2024]
Abstract
Antibody-drug conjugates (ADCs) are a heterogeneous mixture of conjugated species with varied drug loadings. Depending on conjugation sites, linkers and drugs can exhibit different stability as influenced by the solvent-accessibility and local charge, resulting in different ADC efficacy, pharmacokinetics, and toxicity. Conjugation site analysis is critical for ADC structural characterization to assure product quality and consistency. It enables early conjugation studies at site-specific levels, confirms the absence of unexpected products to support conjugation process development, and aids in ensuring lot-to-lot consistency for comparability studies. Peptide mapping using liquid chromatography-tandem mass spectrometry is the industry standard method for analyzing conjugation sites. However, some concerns remain for this approach as the large and hydrophobic drug moieties often result in poor MS/MS fragmentation quality and impede the identification of conjugation sites. Additionally, the ionization discrepancy between conjugated and unconjugated peptides can lead to a relatively large bias for site occupancy calculation. In this work, we present a simple drug deconjugation-assisted peptide mapping method to identify and quantify the drug conjugation for ADCs with protease-cleavable linkers. Papain-based drug deconjugation was used to remove the highly hydrophobic drug moiety, which significantly improved the quantitation accuracy of conjugation level and the fragmentation quality. Sample preparation conditions were optimized to avoid introducing artificial modifications, allowing the tracking of initial sample status and subsequent changes of quality attributes during process development and stability assessment. This method was applied to analyze thermally-stressed ADC samples to monitor changes of site-specific conjugation levels, DAR, succinimide hydrolysis of the linker, and various PTMs. We believe this is an effective and straightforward tool for conjugation site analysis while simultaneously monitoring multiple quality attributes for ADCs with protease-cleavable linkers.
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Affiliation(s)
- Tongdan Wang
- Mass Spectrometry Center of Excellence, Analytical Sciences, WuXi Biologics, 288 Fute Zhong Road, Waigaoqiao Free Trade Zone, Shanghai 200131, China.
| | - Zi-Ao Huang
- Mass Spectrometry Center of Excellence, Analytical Sciences, WuXi Biologics, 288 Fute Zhong Road, Waigaoqiao Free Trade Zone, Shanghai 200131, China
| | - Moyin Zhou
- Mass Spectrometry Center of Excellence, Analytical Sciences, WuXi Biologics, 288 Fute Zhong Road, Waigaoqiao Free Trade Zone, Shanghai 200131, China
| | - Ruxin Wang
- Mass Spectrometry Center of Excellence, Analytical Sciences, WuXi Biologics, 288 Fute Zhong Road, Waigaoqiao Free Trade Zone, Shanghai 200131, China
| | - Yufei Li
- Mass Spectrometry Center of Excellence, Analytical Sciences, WuXi Biologics, 288 Fute Zhong Road, Waigaoqiao Free Trade Zone, Shanghai 200131, China
| | - Longyun Guo
- Mass Spectrometry Center of Excellence, Analytical Sciences, WuXi Biologics, 288 Fute Zhong Road, Waigaoqiao Free Trade Zone, Shanghai 200131, China
| | - Xiaolin Cao
- Mass Spectrometry Center of Excellence, Analytical Sciences, WuXi Biologics, 288 Fute Zhong Road, Waigaoqiao Free Trade Zone, Shanghai 200131, China
| | - Jincui Huang
- Mass Spectrometry Center of Excellence, Analytical Sciences, WuXi Biologics, 288 Fute Zhong Road, Waigaoqiao Free Trade Zone, Shanghai 200131, China.
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Abstract
Lysine-conjugated antibody-drug conjugates (ADCs) are formed by attaching cytotoxic drugs to reactive lysine residues of monoclonal antibodies (mAbs) through chemical linkers. During production, the payloads are conjugated nonspecifically to lysine residues in mAbs, resulting in a heterogeneous mixture of ADCs with both different number and conjugation sites of drug payloads per mAb. On account of the drug conjugation sites and levels that both have significant influences on physical and pharmaceutical properties of ADCs, a reliable and straightforward approach for conjugation site analysis for ADCs is highly demanded. Herein, we used a lysine-conjugated ADC, Trastuzumab-MCC-DM1 (T-DM1), as a model ADC, and described an integrative strategy that combines the signature ion fingerprinting method for rapid and reliable filtering of DM1-conjugated peptides, and the normalized area quantitation approach for accurately gauging the conjugation levels for each identified site. This approach is believed to be readily applicable to other maytansinoid derivatives-modified ADCs, and more importantly, universally applicable to lysine-conjugated ADCs for both the recognition of conjugation sites and the measurement of conjugation levels.
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Affiliation(s)
- Hua Sang
- Department of Pharmacy, Affiliated Hospital of Nantong University, Nantong, Jiangsu, People's Republic of China
- Key Laboratory of Drug Metabolism and Pharmacokinetics, State Key Laboratory of Natural Medicines, China Pharmaceutical University, Nanjing, Jiangsu, People's Republic of China
| | - Ning Wan
- Key Laboratory of Drug Metabolism and Pharmacokinetics, State Key Laboratory of Natural Medicines, China Pharmaceutical University, Nanjing, Jiangsu, People's Republic of China
| | - Gaoyuan Lu
- School of Pharmacy, China Pharmaceutical University, Nanjing, Jiangsu, People's Republic of China
| | - Yang Tian
- School of Pharmacy, China Pharmaceutical University, Nanjing, Jiangsu, People's Republic of China
| | - Guangji Wang
- Key Laboratory of Drug Metabolism and Pharmacokinetics, State Key Laboratory of Natural Medicines, China Pharmaceutical University, Nanjing, Jiangsu, People's Republic of China
| | - Hui Ye
- Key Laboratory of Drug Metabolism and Pharmacokinetics, State Key Laboratory of Natural Medicines, China Pharmaceutical University, Nanjing, Jiangsu, People's Republic of China.
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