Development of a 3D-LC/MS Workflow for Fast, Automated, and Effective Characterization of Glycosylation Patterns of Biotherapeutic Products.

Glycosylation is a common post-translational modification of therapeutic monoclonal antibodies produced in mammalian cells and is considered an important critical quality attribute (CQA), as it is known to impact efficacy, stability, half-life, and immunogenicity. For these reasons, glycosylation requires characterization and close monitoring during the manufacturing process. Due to the complexity of the glycosylation patterns, sophisticated analytical tools with high resolving power are required for the characterization of the glycoforms. This study describes, for the first time, the development and use of an online three-dimensional high-performance liquid chromatography/mass spectrometry (3D-HPLC/MS) approach for the monitoring of glycosylation patterns at the middle-up level. An immobilized IdeS-enzyme column was used in the first dimension for the digestion of mAbs in 10 min. Then, following an online reversed phase liquid chromatography (RPLC) column reduction, the ≈25 kDa proteolytic fragments were analyzed using hydrophilic interaction chromatography (HILIC) coupled to MS. This novel analytical workflow demonstrated the ability to accurately profile glycosylated variants within a total run time of 95 min. To compare the performance of this analytical strategy with a conventional offline procedure (IdeS digestion x reduction-HILIC/MS), a proof of concept study using two mAbs is described here.