A Series of Collaborations Between Various Pharmaceutical Companies and Regulatory Authorities Concerning the Analysis of Biomolecules Using Capillary Electrophoresis

An international project team (including members from US, Canada and UK) has been formed from a number of interested biopharmaceutical companies and regulatory authorities to conduct a cross-organisation collaboration exercise. The results from this exercise demonstrate the robustness of CE-SDS across eight different organisations that used instruments of the same equipment model, the same reagents, and the same methodology. Data generated from the analysis of a series of molecular weight markers showed very good precision with regards to relative migration time (RMT) both within and between organisations. The apparent molecular weight of bovine serum albumin (BSA) was measured with good precision to within approximately 2% RSD across the participants. A representative IgG sample showed similar results with regards to relative migration time of its 3 main components, IgG Light Chain, IgG Non-glycosylated Heavy Chain, and IgG Heavy Chain. Fractional peak area for each peak also showed good agreement, with less than 9% RSD for all peaks. This exercise will facilitate both increased regulatory and industrial opinion of CE for biopharmaceutical analysis.CE in the Biotechnology & Pharmaceutical Industries: 7th Symposium on the Practical Applications for the Analysis of Proteins, Nucleotides and Small Molecules, Montreal, Canada, August 12–16, 2005     

Analysis of Glycosylated Type II Interleukin-1 Receptor (IL-1R) by Imaged Capillary Isoelectric Focusing (i-cIEF)

Glycoproteins typically produce a complex charge profile due to their heterogeneous glycosylation pattern. We developed a reproducible imaged capillary isoelectric focusing (i-cIEF) method to monitor the charge variants of recombinant human Type II Interleukin-1 receptor (IL-1R), a heavily glycosylated protein expressed as a soluble receptor in Chinese Hamster Ovary (CHO) cells. This method was proved to be informative in multiple settings: monitoring of upstream process and downstream purification, analysis of in-process samples, characterization of the bulk drug substance, as well as testing of stability samples during drug development. The i-cIEF method was efficient at detecting changes in the charge isoform profile during different steps of the purification procedures or resulting from modifications of cell culture conditions. In addition, this method was well suited to monitor the consistency of sialic acid distribution and to detect deamidation events occurring in accelerated stability studies. The i-cIEF method presented here provides an improvement over IEF slab gels in terms of resolution, automation and quantitation. Due to its exquisite resolution of narrow pI range, this technology can find applications in quality control environment as identity assay as well as in the analytical laboratory to monitor subtle modifications of the protein.     

A Series of Collaborations between Various Pharmaceutical Companies and Regulatory Authorities Concerning the Analysis of Biomolecules Using Capillary Electrophoresis: Additional Instruments/Buffer

An international project team (including members from US, Canada and UK) was formed from a number of interested biopharmaceutical companies and regulatory authorities to conduct a cross-organisation collaboration exercise. The results of the first comparison with eight different organisations that used instruments of the same equipment model, the same reagents, and the same methodology has been reported previously [1]. This report represents the addition of other instruments using a different run buffer. The relative migration times were different, as expected, prohibiting a direct comparison between companies. The within-organisation variability was low for both relative migration time (<0.34% RSD% for all companies save one) and the peak area (<5% RSD% for all companies save one) when measuring the purity of a representative IgG sample. The apparent molecular weight of bovine serum albumin was measured with good precision (less than 10% RSD% across all companies) to the theoretical value when all data is utilized (67.5 kDa compared to 66.4 kDa). For a representative IgG sample, the three main components, IgG Light Chain, IgG Non-glycosylated Heavy Chain, and IgG Heavy Chain, could not be separated, specifically the IgG Non-glycosylated Heavy Chain and IgG Heavy Chain. When the IgG Non-glycosylated Heavy Chain and IgG Heavy Chain were combined for all organisations, the fractional peak area for the IgG Light Chain and IgG Non-glycosylated Heavy Chain + IgG Heavy Chain peak also showed excellent agreement, with less than 7.5 and 3.5% RSD%, respectively. The value of this exercise is in demonstrating the reliability of CE for the determination of apparent size of biopharmaceutical proteins. This underpins the appropriate use of such CE data in support of regulatory submissions.     

Analysis of Glycosylated Type II Interleukin-1 Receptor (IL-1R) by Imaged Capillary Isoelectric Focusing (i-cIEF)

Glycoproteins typically produce a complex charge profile due to their heterogeneous glycosylation pattern. We developed a reproducible imaged capillary isoelectric focusing (i-cIEF) method to monitor the charge variants of recombinant human Type II Interleukin-1 receptor (IL-1R), a heavily glycosylated protein expressed as a soluble receptor in Chinese Hamster Ovary (CHO) cells. This method was proved to be informative in multiple settings: monitoring of upstream process and downstream purification, analysis of in-process samples, characterization of the bulk drug substance, as well as testing of stability samples during drug development. The i-cIEF method was efficient at detecting changes in the charge isoform profile during different steps of the purification procedures or resulting from modifications of cell culture conditions. In addition, this method was well suited to monitor the consistency of sialic acid distribution and to detect deamidation events occurring in accelerated stability studies. The i-cIEF method presented here provides an improvement over IEF slab gels in terms of resolution, automation and quantitation. Due to its exquisite resolution of narrow pI range, this technology can find applications in quality control environment as identity assay as well as in the analytical laboratory to monitor subtle modifications of the protein.

     

Electrophoretic evidence for the presence of structural isoforms specific for the IgG2 isotype

Recombinant monoclonal antibodies of therapeutic interest were analyzed by a nonreduced CE-SDS (nrCE-SDS) method developed for the evaluation of size-based variants. We found that immunoglobulins analyzed by this technique exhibited different behavior depending on their subclasses. Under nrCE-SDS conditions, IgG1 molecules were separated in a well-resolved, single peak, whereas IgG2 molecules were consistently separated as a doublet. Investigation of these isoforms showed that they were structurally different, and that the difference was not caused by cell culture condition, glycosylation structure, or recombinant expression system. Commercially available IgG2 affinity-purified from human plasma also showed the presence of structural isoforms. The structural isoforms remained present under pH- and temperature-stressed conditions. Application of a mild cysteine/cystine redox potential converted the main peak doublet into a single peak, indicating that these isoforms were disulfide bond-related species. Bioactivity measured before and after application of a redox potential gave similar values, indicating that the structural isoforms have comparable potency. The nrCE-SDS technique described here demonstrated a unique capability to resolve IgGs, leading to the discovery of novel structural isoforms specific to the IgG2 isotype.     

A Series of Collaborations between Various Pharmaceutical Companies and Regulatory Authorities Concerning the Analysis of Biomolecules Using Capillary Electrophoresis: Additional Instruments/Buffer

An international project team (including members from US, Canada and UK) was formed from a number of interested biopharmaceutical companies and regulatory authorities to conduct a cross-organisation collaboration exercise. The results of the first comparison with eight different organisations that used instruments of the same equipment model, the same reagents, and the same methodology has been reported previously [1]. This report represents the addition of other instruments using a different run buffer. The relative migration times were different, as expected, prohibiting a direct comparison between companies. The within-organisation variability was low for both relative migration time (<0.34% RSD% for all companies save one) and the peak area (<5% RSD% for all companies save one) when measuring the purity of a representative IgG sample. The apparent molecular weight of bovine serum albumin was measured with good precision (less than 10% RSD% across all companies) to the theoretical value when all data is utilized (67.5 kDa compared to 66.4 kDa). For a representative IgG sample, the three main components, IgG Light Chain, IgG Non-glycosylated Heavy Chain, and IgG Heavy Chain, could not be separated, specifically the IgG Non-glycosylated Heavy Chain and IgG Heavy Chain. When the IgG Non-glycosylated Heavy Chain and IgG Heavy Chain were combined for all organisations, the fractional peak area for the IgG Light Chain and IgG Non-glycosylated Heavy Chain + IgG Heavy Chain peak also showed excellent agreement, with less than 7.5 and 3.5% RSD%, respectively. The value of this exercise is in demonstrating the reliability of CE for the determination of apparent size of biopharmaceutical proteins. This underpins the appropriate use of such CE data in support of regulatory submissions.