Chemometric Outlier Classification of 2D-NMR Spectra to Enable Higher Order Structure Characterization of Protein Therapeutics

Chemometr Intell Lab Syst. 2020:199:10.1016/j.chemolab.2020.103973. doi: 10.1016/j.chemolab.2020.103973.

Abstract

Protein therapeutics are vitally important clinically and commercially, with monoclonal antibody (mAb) therapeutic sales alone accounting for $115 billion in revenue for 2018.[1] In order for these therapeutics to be safe and efficacious, their protein components must maintain their high order structure (HOS), which includes retaining their three-dimensional fold and not forming aggregates. As demonstrated in the recent NISTmAb Interlaboratory nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) Study[2], NMR spectroscopy is a robust and precise approach to address this HOS measurement need. Using the NISTmAb study data, we benchmark a procedure for automated outlier detection used to identify spectra that are not of sufficient quality for further automated analysis. When applied to a diverse collection of all 252 1H,13C gHSQC spectra from the study, a recursive version of the automated procedure performed comparably to visual analysis, and identified three outlier cases that were missed by the human analyst. In total, this method represents a distinct advance in chemometric detection of outliers due to variation in both measurement and sample.

Keywords: NISTmAb; Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR); biopharmaceuticals; chemometrics; higher order structure; monoclonal antibody (mAb); spectral similarity metric.