Elucidating the effects of pH shift on IgG1 monoclonal antibody acidic charge variant levels in Chinese hamster ovary cell cultures.

Charge variants, especially acidic charge variants, in recombinant monoclonal antibodies are critical quality attributes, which can affect antibodies' properties in vitro and in vivo. Meanwhile, charge variants are cumulative effects of various post-translational modifications and chemical degradations on antibody. In this work, to investigate the effect of lowering culture pH in the stationary phase on acidic charge variant contents in fed-batch cultures and its mechanism, cell culture experiments in 2-L bioreactors were firstly performed to explore the changes in the charge distribution under the pH downshift condition using weak cation exchange chromatography. It is found that acidic charge variant contents were significantly decreased by pH downshift. Then, to reveal the mechanism by which the content of acidic charge variants is reduced under pH downshift condition, the variation of post-translational modifications and chemical degradations under the pH downshift condition was explored. Meanwhile, the structure of the acidic charge variants was characterized. Several analysis experiments including size exclusion chromatography, capillary electrophoresis-sodium dodecyl sulfate under non-reducing conditions, tryptic peptide map, and reduced antibody mass were applied in this study. The results show that the mechanism by which the content of acidic charge variants is reduced is that the contents of disulfide bond reduction, galactosylation, and asparagine deamination of the HC-N388 in the Fc domain were reduced by pH downshift.

Monitoring sialylation levels of Fc-fusion protein using size-exclusion chromatography as a process analytical technology tool.

OBJECTIVE: To develop a rapid process analytical technology (PAT) tool that can measure sialic acid content of an Fc-fusion protein from cell culture samples. RESULTS: A statistical significant correlation between the sialic acid content and size-exclusion chromatography (SEC)-HPLC retention time of an Fc-fusion protein was observed when analyzing the titer of the samples. Using linear fitting analysis, the data fit the model well with R (2) = 0.985. Based on the SDS-PAGE and oligosaccharide analysis, we speculate that the amounts of the glycans could expand the structure of the Fc-fusion protein. This was manifested by the SEC-HPLC method in which proteins were separated based on its molecular size. In order to development a robust PAT method, an internal standard was used to improve the precision of the method by reducing systematic errors. We found the change of SEC retention time (delta t) and sialic acid content were highly correlated (R (2) = 0.992). This method was further validated by a 1500 l production process. CONCLUSION: SEC-HPLC is a promising PAT tool to monitor the sialic acid content of Fc-fusion protein during biomanufacturing or medium optimization processes.

Galactose supplementation enhance sialylation of recombinant Fc-fusion protein in CHO cell: an insight into the role of galactosylation in sialylation.

Sialic acid levels of therapeutic glycoprotein play an important role in plasma half-life. An undesirable decrease of sialic acid content was observed when we increased Fc-fusion protein productivity fourfold in a GS-CHO cell line by bioprocess optimization. We investigated the potential mechanism for the sialic acid content reduction. We found that limited nucleotide sugar precursor and the extracellular sialidase were not responsible for the reduction of the sialic acid content after titer improvement. Oligosaccharide analysis revealed that the lack of protein galactosylation was the potential cause for the reduction of sialic acid content. Thus we validated this notion by evaluated galactose supplementation in 2 L bioreactors. Cell culture performance was not impacted by addition of up to 40 mM galactose except for the glucose consumption rate. Addition of 20 mM galactose to the bioreactor resulted in the increase of 44 % for total sialic acid content and 20.3 % for sialylated glycans. These data were further validated when the process was run on 200 L scaled bioreactor. These data together show that the galactosylation plays an apparent role in sialylation in our current system.

Chinese hamster ovary cell performance enhanced by a rational divide-and-conquer strategy for chemically defined medium development.

Basal medium design is considered one of the most important steps in process development. To optimize chemically defined (CD) media efficiently and effectively for the biopharmaceutical industry, a two-step rational strategy was applied to optimize four antibody producing Chinese hamster ovary (CHO) cell lines. In the first step, 48 of 52 components of our in-house medium were divided into three groups according to their characteristics. In the next step, these groups were optimized by spent medium analysis, response surface methodology and mixture design. Because these steps in our strategy involved dividing medium components into groups and subsequently adjusting the concentration of the components, we termed this medium development strategy "divide and conquer". By applying the strategy, we were able to improve the titers of CHO-S, CHO-DG44 and two CHO-K1 cell lines 1.92, 1.86, 2.92 and 1.62-fold, respectively, in 8 weeks with fewer than 60 tests. This divide-and-conquer strategy was efficient, effective, scalable and universal in our current study and offered a new approach to CD media development.