Technical / White Paper
Orthogonal Approaches for the Analysis of Protein Sequence and Post Translational Modifications of a Monoclonal Antibody
Monoclonal antibodies are an important class of biopharmaceuticals. They are expressed from living cells and therefore, are subject to complex biochemical pathways. Not all of these pathways are fully understood and many are known to be sensitive to subtle environmental changes during production. These changes may affect the final biopharmaceutical sequence, structure and post-translational modifications.
This is in addition to any changes that may occur during subsequent purification. This means that the final product from one batch may be subtly different from another batch. Furthermore, each batch is a heterogeneous mix of similar molecules.
Analysis of the degree of batch-to-batch variation, and batch heterogeneity, is therefore, very important to establish in order to be confident that the drug is safe and effective for medicinal use.
