Correction: Optimisation of the dibromomaleimide (DBM) platform for native antibody conjugation by accelerated post-conjugation hydrolysis.

Correction for 'Optimisation of the dibromomaleimide (DBM) platform for native antibody conjugation by accelerated post-conjugation hydrolysis' by Maurício Morais et al., Org. Biomol. Chem., 2017, 15, 2947-2952, DOI: .

Optimisation of the dibromomaleimide (DBM) platform for native antibody conjugation by accelerated post-conjugation hydrolysis.

Disulfide bridging offers a convenient approach to generate site-selective antibody conjugates from native antibodies. To optimise the reagents available to achieve this strategy, we describe here the use of dibromomaleimides designed to undergo accelerated post-conjugation hydrolysis. Conjugation and hydrolysis, which serve to 'lock' the conjugates as robustly stable maleamic acids, is achieved in just over 1 h. This dramatic acceleration is also shown to infer significant improvements in homogeneity, as demonstrated by mass spectrometry analysis.

A platform for efficient, thiol-stable conjugation to albumin's native single accessible cysteine.

Herein we report the use of bromomaleimides for the construction of stable albumin conjugates via conjugation to its native, single accessible, cysteine followed by hydrolysis. Advantages over the classical maleimide approach are highlighted in terms of quantitative hydrolysis and absence of undesirable retro-Michael deconjugation.

Functional native disulfide bridging enables delivery of a potent, stable and targeted antibody-drug conjugate (ADC).

Herein we report the use of next generation maleimides (NGMs) for the construction of a potent antibody-drug conjugate (ADC) via functional disulfide bridging. The linker has excellent stability in blood serum and the ADC, armed with monomethyl auristatin E (MMAE), shows excellent potency and cancer cell selectivity in vitro.

A plug-and-play approach to antibody-based therapeutics via a chemoselective dual click strategy.

Although recent methods for the engineering of antibody-drug conjugates (ADCs) have gone some way to addressing the challenging issues of ADC construction, significant hurdles still remain. There is clear demand for the construction of novel ADC platforms that offer greater stability, homogeneity and flexibility. Here we describe a significant step towards a platform for next-generation antibody-based therapeutics by providing constructs that combine site-specific modification, exceptional versatility and high stability, with retention of antibody binding and structure post-modification. The relevance of the work in a biological context is also demonstrated in a cytotoxicity assay and a cell internalization study with HER2-positive and -negative breast cancer cell lines.

A novel synthetic chemistry approach to linkage-specific ubiquitin conjugation.

Ubiquitination is of great importance as the post-translational modification of proteins with ubiquitin, or ubiquitin chains, facilitates a number of vital cellular processes. Herein we present a facile method of preparing various ubiquitin conjugates under mild conditions using michael acceptors based on dibromo-maleimides and dibromo-pyridazinediones.

Next generation maleimides enable the controlled assembly of antibody-drug conjugates via native disulfide bond bridging.

The advent of Adcetris™ and Kadcyla™, two recently FDA-approved antibody-drug conjugates (ADCs), in the clinic has had a major impact on the treatment of lymphoma and breast cancer patients, respectively, worldwide. Despite these successes many new ADCs fail at various stages of development, often due to shortcomings in the methods used for their assembly. To address this problem we have developed next generation maleimides (NGMs), which specifically re-bridge reduced interchain disulfide bonds and allow the efficient conjugation of small molecules to antibodies, without the need for engineering of the target antibody. The method is site-specific and generates near homogeneous products in good yields. Moreover, adjustment of the reaction conditions allows control of the conjugation in terms of stoichiometry (drug-loading) and site selectivity. Using this method we prepared a series of ADCs from trastuzumab and doxorubicin (DOX) with a controlled drug-to-antibody ratio (DAR) of 1, 2, 3 and 4. All of these constructs were fully active by ELISA and had more than 90% of re-bridged disulfide bonds by CE-SDS when compared to clinical grade antibody. Furthermore, digest experiments of the DAR 2 material revealed that almost all of the drug had been targeted to the Fab arms of the antibody. Thus, NGMs offer a flexible and simple platform for the controlled assembly of ADCs from an antibody.

Homogeneous bispecifics by disulfide bridging.

We report on a chemical platform to generate site-specific, homogeneous, antibody-antibody conjugates by targeting and bridging disulfide bonds. A bispecific antibody construct was produced in good yield through simple reduction and bridging of antibody fragment disulfide bonds, using a readily synthesized bis-dibromomaleimide cross-linker. Binding activity of antibodies was maintained, and in vitro binding of target antigens was observed. This technology is demonstrated through linking scFv and Fab antibody fragments, showing its potential for the construction of a diverse range of bispecifics.

A rapid, site-selective and efficient route to the dual modification of DARPins.

Designed ankyrin repeat proteins (DARPins) are valuable tools in both biochemistry and medicine. Herein we describe a rapid, simple method for the dual modification of DARPins by introduction of cysteine mutations at specific positions that results in a vast difference in their thiol nucleophilicity, allowing for clean sequential modification.

Regioselective and stoichiometrically controlled conjugation of photodynamic sensitizers to a HER2 targeting antibody fragment.

The rapidly increasing interest in the synthesis of antibody-drug conjugates as powerful targeted anticancer agents demonstrates the growing appreciation of the power of antibodies and antibody fragments as highly selective targeting moieties. This targeting ability is of particular interest in the area of photodynamic therapy, as the applicability of current clinical photosensitizers is limited by their relatively poor accumulation in target tissue in comparison to healthy tissue. Although synthesis of porphyrin-antibody conjugates has been previously demonstrated, existing work in this area has been hindered by the limitations of conventional antibody conjugation methods. This work describes the attachment of azide-functionalized, water-soluble porphyrins to a tratuzumab Fab fragment via a novel conjugation methodology. This method allows for the synthesis of a homogeneous product without the loss of structural stability associated with conventional methods of disulfide modification. Biological evaluation of the synthesized conjugates demonstrates excellent selectivity for a HER2 positive cell line over the control, with no dark toxicity observed in either case.

Bromo- and thiomaleimides as a new class of thiol-mediated fluorescence 'turn-on' reagents.

Bromo- and thiomaleimides are shown to serve as highly effective quenchers of a covalently attached fluorophore. Reactions with thiols that lead to removal of the maleimide conjugation, or detachment of the fluorophore from the maleimide, result in 'turn-on' of the fluorescence. These reagents thus offer opportunities in thiol sensing and intracellular reporting.

A mild synthesis of N-functionalised bromomaleimides, thiomaleimides and bromopyridazinediones.

Bromomaleimides are useful building blocks in synthesis and powerful reagents for the selective chemical modification of proteins. A mild new synthesis of these reagents is described, along with the convenient transferability of the approach to dithiomaleimides and bromopyridazinediones.

Acid-cleavable thiomaleamic acid linker for homogeneous antibody-drug conjugation.

In this communication we describe a novel acid-cleavable linker strategy for antibody-drug conjugation. Functional disulfide bridging of the single interchain disulfide bond of a trastuzumab Fab fragment yields a homogeneous antibody-drug conjugate bearing a thiomaleamic acid linker. This linker is stable at physiological pH and temperature, but quantitatively cleaves at lysosomal pH to release the drug payload.

Homogeneous antibody fragment conjugation by disulfide bridging introduces 'spinostics'.

A major obstacle to the efficient production of antibody conjugates for therapy and diagnosis is the non-ideal performance of commonly used chemical methods for the attachment of effector-molecules to the antibody of interest. Here we demonstrate that this limitation can be simply addressed using 3,4-substituted maleimides to bridge and thus functionalize disulfide bonds to generate homogeneous antibody conjugates. This one-step conjugation reaction is fast, site-specific, quantitative and generates products with full binding activity, good plasma stability and the desired functional properties. Furthermore, the rigid nature of this modification by disulfide bridging enables the successful detection of antigen with a spin labeled antibody fragment by continuous-wave electron paramagnetic resonance (cw-EPR), which we report here for the first time. Antigen detection is concentration dependent, observable in human blood and allows the discrimination of fragments with different binding affinity. We envisage broad potential for antibody based in-solution diagnostic methods by EPR or 'spinostics'.

Reversible protein affinity-labelling using bromomaleimide-based reagents.

Reversible protein biotinylation is readily affected via conjugation with a bromomaleimide-based reagent followed by reductive cleavage. The intermediate biotinylated protein constructs are stable at physiological temperature and pH 8.0. Quantitative reversibility is elegantly delivered under mild conditions of using a stoichiometric amount of a bis-thiol, thus providing an approach that will be of general interest in chemical biology and proteomics.

Evaluating the use of Apo-neocarzinostatin as a cell penetrating protein.

Protein-ligand complex neocarzinostatin (NCS) is a small, thermostable protein-ligand complex that is able to deliver its ligand cargo into live mammalian cells where it induces DNA damage. Apo-NCS is able to functionally display complementarity determining regions loops, and has been hypothesised to act as a cell-penetrating protein, which would make it an ideal scaffold for cell targeting, and subsequent intracellular delivery of small-molecule drugs. In order to evaluate apo-NCS as a cell penetrating protein, we have evaluated the efficiency of its internalisation into live HeLa cells using matrix-assisted laser-desorption ionization-time-of-flight mass spectrometry and fluorescence microscopy. Following incubation of cells with apo-NCS, we observed no evidence of internalisation.

A novel approach to the site-selective dual labelling of a protein via chemoselective cysteine modification.

Local protein microenvironment is used to control the outcome of reaction between cysteine residues and 2,5-dibromohexanediamide. The differential reactivity is exploited to introduce two orthogonal reactive handles onto the surface of a double cysteine mutant of superfolder green fluorescent protein in a regioselective manner. Subsequent elaboration with commonly used thiol and alkyne containing reagents affects site-selective protein dual labelling.

Bioconjugation of green fluorescent protein via an unexpectedly stable cyclic sulfonium intermediate.

Smooth converter: Bioconjugation of superfolder GFP involving the formation of an unusually stable, and unprecedented, cyclic sulfonium species is described. This sulfonium can undergo smooth reaction with a range of nucleophiles to give sulfur-, selenium- and azide-modified GFP derivatives in high conversions.

Directed evolution to re-adapt a co-evolved network within an enzyme.

We have previously used targeted active-site saturation mutagenesis to identify a number of transketolase single mutants that improved activity towards either glycolaldehyde (GA), or the non-natural substrate propionaldehyde (PA). Here, all attempts to recombine the singles into double mutants led to unexpected losses of specific activity towards both substrates. A typical trade-off occurred between soluble expression levels and specific activity for all single mutants, but many double mutants decreased both properties more severely suggesting a critical loss of protein stability or native folding. Statistical coupling analysis (SCA) of a large multiple sequence alignment revealed a network of nine co-evolved residues that affected all but one double mutant. Such networks maintain important functional properties such as activity, specificity, folding, stability, and solubility and may be rapidly disrupted by introducing one or more non-naturally occurring mutations. To identify variants of this network that would accept and improve upon our best D469 mutants for activity towards PA, we created a library of random single, double and triple mutants across seven of the co-evolved residues, combining our D469 variants with only naturally occurring mutations at the remaining sites. A triple mutant cluster at D469, E498 and R520 was found to behave synergistically for the specific activity towards PA. Protein expression was severely reduced by E498D and improved by R520Q, yet variants containing both mutations led to improved specific activity and enzyme expression, but with loss of solubility and the formation of inclusion bodies. D469S and R520Q combined synergistically to improve k(cat) 20-fold for PA, more than for any previous transketolase mutant. R520Q also doubled the specific activity of the previously identified D469T to create our most active transketolase mutant to date. Our results show that recombining active-site mutants obtained by saturation mutagenesis can rapidly destabilise critical networks of co-evolved residues, whereas beneficial single mutants can be retained and improved upon by randomly recombining them with natural variants at other positions in the network.