Intact and middle-down CIEF of commercial therapeutic monoclonal antibody products under non-denaturing conditions.

A two-step CIEF with chemical mobilization was developed for charge profiling of the therapeutic mAb rituximab under non-denaturing separation conditions. CIEF of the intact mAb was combined with a middle-down approach analyzing Fc/2 and F(ab´) fragments after digest with a commercial cysteine protease (IdeS). CIEF methods were optimized separately for the intact mAb and its fragments due to their divergent pIs. Best resolution was achieved by combining Pharmalyte (PL) 8-10.5 with PL 3-10 for variants of intact rituximab and of F(ab´) fragments, respectively, whereas PL 6.7-7.7 in combination with PL 3-10 was used for Fc/2 variants. Charge heterogeneity in Fc/2 dominates over F(ab´) . In addition, a copy product of rituximab, and adalimumab were analyzed. Both mAbs contain additional alkaline C-terminal lysine variants as confirmed by digest with carboxypeptidase B. The optimized CIEF methods for intact mAb and Fc/2 were tested for their potential as platform approaches for these mAbs. The CIEF method for Fc/2 was slightly adapted in this process. The pI values for major intact mAb variants were determined by adjacent pI markers resulting in 9.29 (rituximab) and 8.42 (adalimumab). In total, seven to eight charge variants could be distinguished for intact adalimumab and rituximab, respectively.