A brief introduction of IgG-like bispecific antibody purification: Methods for removing product-related impurities

Abstract

Bispecific antibodies (bsAbs) are antibodies that can simultaneously bind two distinct targets or epitopes. Their dual-targeting capacity offers expanded therapeutic potential. Currently there is a strong interest in design and production of bsAbs to achieve improved efficacy through novel mechanisms of action. However, due to the co-expression of up to four distinct polypeptide chains or assembly involving chains with extended length (in the appended IgG format), recombinant production of IgG-like bsAbs is often accompanied with increased level of product-related impurities (byproducts and aggregates) resulting from heavy chain homodimerization, heavy chain-light chain mispairing, unbalanced expression of different chains and intermolecular misassociation. As some of the byproducts display close similarity to the target bsAb, their removal poses significant challenges to the downstream processing. This article reviews methods that can effectively remove product-related impurities in IgG-like bsAb purification.

Keywords: Aggregates; Bispecific antibody (bsAb); Half-antibody; Heterodimer; Homodimer; Hydroxyapatite (HA); Mixed-mode resin; Single-chain variable fragment (scFv).