Stability of complex biotherapeutics like monoclonal antibodies is paramount for their safe and efficacious use. Excipients are inactive ingredients that are added to the purified product so as to offer it a stable environment. Trehalose dihydrate is a non-reducing sugar that is commonly used as a stabilizing agent in biotherapeutic formulations under liquid and frozen states.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFRecent advancements in technology, such as the emergence of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML), have facilitated the progression of the biopharmaceutical industry toward the implementation of Industry 4.0. As per the guidelines set by the USFDA, process validation for biopharmaceutical production consists of three stages: process design, process qualification, and continuous process verification (CPV).
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBuffer exchange is a critical step in biologics development, playing a pivotal role in removing contaminants, adjusting sample conditions, and facilitating compatibility studies. The efficiency of centrifugal concentrators for polysorbate removal was compared to a two-step approach involving a surfactant removal column followed by buffer exchange. Trastuzumab-pkrb from Herzuma® was used.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFProtein Expr Purif
March 2025
Antigen binding fragments (Fabs) are an emerging class of biotherapeutics, widely accepted as an alternative to the traditional monoclonal antibodies (mAbs). The small size of the Fabs offers better tissue penetrability and lack of Fc region, thereby resulting in reduced side effects. However, since Fab molecules lack Fc region, Protein A chromatography (the ubiquitous capture step in mAb platforms) cannot be employed.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFUnified translation of medical images from one-to-many distinct modalities is desirable in healthcare settings. A ubiquitous approach for bilateral medical scan translation is one-to-one mapping with GANs. However, its efficacy in encapsulating diversity in a pool of medical scans and performing one-to-many translation is questionable.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFInt J Biol Macromol
December 2024
Changes in charge variant profile are known to affect mAb stability and vice versa. This report elucidates the effects of magnesium metal (0.5 mM Mg) on trastuzumab (IgG1 antibody).
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAnn N Y Acad Sci
November 2024
This study aims to establish a cost basis for biologics manufacturers and policymakers by quantifying the price and time required to bring a biosimilar from the lab to market. For efficient implementation of a cost-based policy, especially for life-saving medicines like biosimilars, it is imperative to establish a benchmark for the cost involved in biosimilar development. In this holistic and multiple-case study, stage-wise cost estimates of biosimilar development were obtained for microbial and mammalian systems.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFA holistic understanding of the charge heterogeneity in monoclonal antibodies (mAbs) is paramount for ensuring acceptable product quality. Hence, biotherapeutic manufacturers are expected to thoroughly characterize their products via advanced analytical techniques. Recently, two-dimensional liquid chromatography (2DLC) methods have gained popularity for resolving complex charged species.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFTherapeutic proteins, such as monoclonal antibodies (mAbs) are known to undergo stability related issues during various stages of product life cycle resulting in the formation of aggregates and fragments. Aggregates of mAb might result in reduced therapeutic activity and could cause various adverse immunogenic responses. Sample containing mAb undergo aggregation due to various types of stress factors, and there is always a continuous interest among researchers and manufacturers to determine the effect of different factors on the stability of mAb.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIntroduction: Early detection of pancreatic cancer continues to be a challenge due to the difficulty in accurately identifying specific signs or symptoms that might correlate with the onset of pancreatic cancer. Unlike breast or colon or prostate cancer where screening tests are often useful in identifying cancerous development, there are no tests to diagnose pancreatic cancers. As a result, most pancreatic cancers are diagnosed at an advanced stage, where treatment options, whether systemic therapy, radiation, or surgical interventions, offer limited efficacy.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPrep Biochem Biotechnol
August 2024
Recombinant fabs dominate the pharmaceutical pipelines today with microbial host systems continuing to be a major contributor toward their production. is a versatile host for recombinant protein expression due to its simplicity, affordability, and ability to be cultivated at high cell density. It is particularly suitable for non-glycosylated proteins and small proteins.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPurpose: Chemical modifications in monoclonal antibodies can change hydrophobicity, charge heterogeneity as well as conformation, which eventually can impact their physical stability. In this study, the effect of the individual charge variants on physical stability and aggregation propensity in two different buffer conditions used during downstream purification was investigated.
Methods: The charge variants were separated using semi-preparative cation exchange chromatography and buffer exchanged in the two buffers with pH 6.
The continuous manufacturing of biologics offers significant advantages in terms of reducing manufacturing costs and increasing capacity, but it is not yet widely implemented by the industry due to major challenges in the automation, scheduling, process monitoring, continued process verification, and real-time control of multiple interconnected processing steps, which must be tightly controlled to produce a safe and efficacious product. The process produces a large amount of data from different sensors, analytical instruments, and offline analyses, requiring organization, storage, and analyses for process monitoring and control without compromising accuracy. We present a case study of a cyber-physical production system (CPPS) for the continuous manufacturing of mAbs that provides an automation infrastructure for data collection and storage in a data historian, along with data management tools that enable real-time analysis of the ongoing process using multivariate algorithms.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAlthough biotherapeutic drugs have the potential of transforming the management of many life-threatening diseases, their affordability and accessibility remain an issue. This study offers an overview of the global affordability of biotherapeutic products. For this, prices for 10 representative biotherapeutic products were examined in 40 countries, including high-income countries (HICs), upper middle-income countries (UMICs), lower middle-income countries (LMICs), and low-income countries (LICs).
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe sole treatment for snakebite envenomation (SBE), the anti-snake venom (ASV), suffers from considerable drawbacks, including side effects and limited species specificity. Additionally, despite its existence for more than a century, uniform availability of good quality ASV does not yet exist. The present review describes the journey of a SBE victim and highlights the global crisis of SBE management.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFMedical image segmentation has made a significant contribution towards delivering affordable healthcare by facilitating the automatic identification of anatomical structures and other regions of interest. Although convolution neural networks have become prominent in the field of medical image segmentation, they suffer from certain limitations. In this study, we present a reliable framework for producing performant outcomes for the segmentation of pathological structures of 2D medical images.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFWhile automated peak detection functionalities are available in commercially accessible software, achieving optimal true positive rates frequently necessitates visual inspection and manual adjustments. In the initial phase of this study, hetero-variants (glycoforms) of a monoclonal antibody were distinguished using liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry, revealing discernible peaks at the intact level. To comprehensively identify each peak (hetero-variant) in the intact-level analysis, a deep learning approach utilizing convolutional neural networks (CNNs) was employed in the subsequent phase of the study.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFLiquid chromatography-mass spectrometry (LC-MS) is widely used for identification and quantification of N-glycans of monoclonal antibodies (mAbs), owing to its high sensitivity and accuracy. However, its resource-intensive nature necessitates the development of rapid and cost-effective orthogonal analysis approaches. This study aims to develop an online method utilizing the Extreme Gradient Boosting (XGBoost) machine learning (ML) algorithm for real time quantification of InstantPC labelled N-glycans by Liquid Chromatography (LC) - fluorescence detector (FLD).
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAdv Protein Chem Struct Biol
May 2024
The immune system is complicated, interconnected, and offers a powerful defense system that protects its host from foreign pathogens. Immunotherapy involves boosting the immune system to kill cancer cells, and nowadays, is a major emerging treatment for cancer. With the advances in our understanding of the immunology of cancer, there has been an explosion of studies to develop and evaluate therapies that engage the immune system in the fight against cancer.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFRobust monitoring of heterogeneity in biopharmaceutical development is crucial for producing safe and efficacious biotherapeutic products. Multiattribute monitoring (MAM) has emerged as an efficient tool for monitoring of mAb heterogeneities like deamidation, sialylation, glycosylation, and oxidation. Conventional biopharma analysis during mAb development relies on use of one-dimensional methods for monitoring titer and charge-based heterogeneity using non-volatile solvents without direct coupling with mass spectrometry (MS).
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAppl Microbiol Biotechnol
April 2024
Cell culture media play a critical role in cell growth and propagation by providing a substrate; media components can also modulate the critical quality attributes (CQAs). However, the inherent complexity of the cell culture media makes unraveling the impact of the various media components on cell growth and CQAs non-trivial. In this study, we demonstrate an end-to-end machine learning framework for media component selection and prediction of CQAs.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPostproduction handling of drug products during preparation or clinical use may affect the structure and efficacy of the drug and perhaps remain unnoticed. Since chemical modifications can impact the product's structure, stability, and biological activity, this study investigates the impact of elevated temperature and subtle shift in pH on the drug product post-dilution in saline. The mAb sample diluted in saline for administration was stressed at elevated temperature and slightly acidic pH condition.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAggregation stability of monoclonal antibody (mAb) therapeutics is influenced by many critical quality attributes (CQA) such as charge and hydrophobic variants in addition to environmental factors. In this study, correlation between charge heterogeneity and stability of mAbs for bevacizumab and trastuzumab has been investigated under a variety of stresses including thermal stress at 40 °C, thermal stress at 55 °C, shaking (mechanical), and low pH. Size- and charge-based heterogeneities were monitored using analytical size exclusion chromatography (SEC) and cation exchange chromatography (CEX), respectively, while dynamic light scattering was used to assess changes in hydrodynamic size.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFMonoclonal antibodies (mAbs) continue to dominate the biopharmaceutical industry. Certain mAbs are prone to fragmentation and clipping and in these cases, adequate removal of these species is critical during manufacturing. Fragments can be generated during fermentation, purification, storage, formulation, and administration.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe foundation of a biosimilar manufacturer's regulatory filing is the demonstration of analytical and functional similarity between the biosimilar product and the pertinent originator product. The excipients in the formulation may interfere with characterization using typical analytical and functional techniques during this biosimilarity exercise. Consequently, the producers of biosimilar products resort to buffer exchange to isolate the biotherapeutic protein from the drug product formulation.
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