Preferential species-restricted heavy/light chain pairing in rat/mouse quadromas. Implications for a single-step purification of bispecific antibodies.

Conventional mouse/mouse or rat/rat hybrid-hybridoma supernatants contain up to 10 different IgG molecules consisting of various combinations of heavy and light chains. Hence, the yield of functional bispecific Ab is low, and purification is often complicated, hampering a general preclinical evaluation of, e.g., bispecific Ab-mediated tumor immunotherapy in animal models. In experiments to overcome this drawback we found that fusion of rat with mouse hybridomas opens the possibility of large scale production of bispecific Ab due to the increased incidence of correctly paired Ab and facilitated purification. In essence, rat/mouse quadroma-derived bispecific Ab have the following advantages: 1) enrichment of functional bispecific Ab because of preferential species-restricted heavy/light chain pairing (observed in four of four rat-mouse quadromas) in contrast to the random pairing in conventional mouse/mouse or rat/rat quadromas, and 2) a possible one-step purification of the quadroma supernatant with protein A. This simple chromatography step does not bind unwanted variants with parental rat/rat heavy chain configuration, and the desired rat/mouse bispecific Ab are retained, which can then easily be separated from parental mouse Ab by sequential pH elution.