Middle-Up Mass Analysis of Therapeutic Antibody Subunit Fragments: Modified and Clipped Species

ASMS 2022, Minneapolis, USA
June 9, 2022

The increasing number and complexity of biotherapeutics are creating new challenges for biopharma analytical departments. While mass spectrometry offers many advantages in biopharmaceutical characterization, methods based on peptide mapping are labor intensive and time-consuming, generating large data sets requiring trained and skilled manual interpretation. A faster and less complex alternative to characterizing antibodies by peptide mapping is middle-up intact mass analysis, which utilizes novel enzymes that cleave antibodies at a highly specific site above or below the hinge, resulting in well-defined fragments (subunits) that are amenable to characterization by LC-MS.

We present a middle-up intact mass analysis method that delivers comprehensive characterization of glycosylated and clipped species in therapeutic antibody samples using a conventional and a proprietary time-resolved deconvolution method.