Biophysical properties of the clinical-stage antibody landscape

Significance In addition to binding to a desired target molecule, all antibody drugs must also meet a set of criteria regarding the feasibility of their manufacture, stability in storage, and absence of off-target stickiness. This suite of characteristics is often termed “developability.” We present here a comprehensive analysis of these properties for essentially the full set of antibody drugs that have been tested in phase-2 or -3 clinical trials, or are approved by the FDA. Surprisingly, many of the drugs or candidates in this set exhibit properties that indicate significant developability risks; however, the number of such red warning flags decreases with advancement toward approval. This reference dataset should help prioritize future drug candidates for development. Antibodies are a highly successful class of biological drugs, with over 50 such molecules approved for therapeutic use and hundreds more currently in clinical development. Improvements in technology for the discovery and optimization of high-potency antibodies have greatly increased the chances for finding binding molecules with desired biological properties; however, achieving drug-like properties at the same time is an additional requirement that is receiving increased attention. In this work, we attempt to quantify the historical limits of acceptability for multiple biophysical metrics of “developability.” Amino acid sequences from 137 antibodies in advanced clinical stages, including 48 approved for therapeutic use, were collected and used to construct isotype-matched IgG1 antibodies, which were then expressed in mammalian cells. The resulting material for each source antibody was evaluated in a dozen biophysical property assays. The distributions of the observed metrics are used to empirically define boundaries of drug-like behavior that can represent practical guidelines for future antibody drug candidates.