A novel screening method to assess developability of antibody-like molecules

Monoclonal antibodies and antibody-like molecules represent a fast-growing class of bio-therapeutics that has rapidly transformed patient care in a variety of disease indications. The discovery of antibodies that bind to particular targets with high affinity is now a routine exercise and a variety of in vitro and in vivo techniques are available for this purpose. However, it is still challenging to identify antibodies that, in addition to having the desired biological effect, also express well, remain soluble at different pH levels, remain stable at high concentrations, can withstand high shear stress, and have minimal non-specific interactions. Many promising antibody programs have ultimately failed in development due to the problems associated with one of these factors. Here, we present a simple high-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC)-based screening method to assess these developability factors earlier in discovery process. This method is robust and requires only microgram quantities of proteins. Briefly, we show that for antibodies injected on a commercially available pre-packed Zenix HPLC column, the retention times are inversely related to their colloidal stability with antibodies prone to precipitation or aggregation retained longer on the column with broader peaks. By simply varying the salt content of running buffer, we were also able to estimate the nature of interactions between the antibodies and the column. We believe this approach should generally be applicable to assessment of the developability of other classes of bio-therapeutic molecules, and that the addition of this simple tool early in the discovery process will lead to selection of molecules with improved developability characteristics.