Nanobodies and their Use in GPCR Drug Discovery.

Nanobodies are therapeutic proteins derived from the variable domain (VHH) of naturally occurring heavy-chain antibodies. These VHH domains are the smallest functional fragments derived from a naturally occurring immunoglobulin. Nanobodies can be easily produced in prokaryotic or eukaryotic host organisms and their unique biophysical characteristics render these molecules ideal candidates for drug development. They are also emerging as an interesting new class of potential therapeutics for targets such as GPCRs, which have historically been challenging for small molecule drug discovery and even more difficult for biologics discovery. The ability to easily combine Nanobodies with different binding sites and different modes of action can be used to generate highly selective and highly potent drug candidates with very attractive pharmacological profiles. In addition, Nanobodies have been used as crystallization chaperones to enable or facilitate the structural determination of an active GPCR conformation.

Multivalent nanobodies targeting death receptor 5 elicit superior tumor cell killing through efficient caspase induction.

Multiple therapeutic agonists of death receptor 5 (DR5) have been developed and are under clinical evaluation. Although these agonists demonstrate significant anti-tumor activity in preclinical models, the clinical efficacy in human cancer patients has been notably disappointing. One possible explanation might be that the current classes of therapeutic molecules are not sufficiently potent to elicit significant response in patients, particularly for dimeric antibody agonists that require secondary cross-linking via Fcγ receptors expressed on immune cells to achieve optimal clustering of DR5. To overcome this limitation, a novel multivalent Nanobody approach was taken with the goal of generating a significantly more potent DR5 agonist. In the present study, we show that trivalent DR5 targeting Nanobodies mimic the activity of natural ligand, and furthermore, increasing the valency of domains to tetramer and pentamer markedly increased potency of cell killing on tumor cells, with pentamers being more potent than tetramers in vitro. Increased potency was attributed to faster kinetics of death-inducing signaling complex assembly and caspase-8 and caspase-3 activation. In vivo, multivalent Nanobody molecules elicited superior anti-tumor activity compared to a conventional DR5 agonist antibody, including the ability to induce tumor regression in an insensitive patient-derived primary pancreatic tumor model. Furthermore, complete responses to Nanobody treatment were obtained in up to 50% of patient-derived primary pancreatic and colon tumor models, suggesting that multivalent DR5 Nanobodies may represent a significant new therapeutic modality for targeting death receptor signaling.

Crystallization and preliminary X-ray structure determination of jack bean urease with a bound antibody fragment.

Urease allows organisms to use exogenous and internally generated urea as a nitrogen source, by catalyzing the hydrolysis of urea to form ammonia and carbon dioxide. Urease may also participate in the systemic nitrogen-transport pathways and possibly acts as a toxic defence protein. Jack bean urease (JBU) was the first nickel-metalloenzyme identified and was crystallized as early as 1926. Despite this, the structure has not yet been determined. An antibody fragment, Fv, that has a high affinity for JBU has been used to aid crystallization. The complex, which retains full enzyme activity, forms very small crystals that diffract weakly to 3.3 A. The crystals belong to the rhombohedral space group R32, with unit-cell parameters a = b = 228.6, c = 130.9 A. The structure of the urease molecule has been solved by molecular replacement using the structure of homogenous enzyme from Klebsiella aerogenes as a search model.