Evaluating the Effects of Hinge Flexibility on the Solution Structure of Antibodies at Concentrated Conditions

Published

December 26, 2018

Author(s)

Marco Blanco, Harold Hatch, Joseph E. Curtis, Vincent K. Shen

Abstract

Employing two different coarse-grained models, we evaluated the effect of intramolecular domain-domain distances and hinge flexibility on the general solution structure of antibodies (mAbs), within the context of protein-protein steric repulsion. These models explicitly account for the hinge region, and represent antibodies at either domain or subdomain levels (i.e., 4- bead and 7-bead representations, respectively). Additionally, different levels of mAb flexibility are also considered. When evaluating mAbs as rigid structures, analysis of small- angle scattering (SAS) profiles showed that changes in the relative internal distances between Fc and Fab domains significantly alter the local arrangement of neighboring molecules, as well as the molecular packing of the concentrated mAb solutions. Likewise, enabling hinge flexibility in either of the mAb models led to qualitatively similar results, where flexibility increases the spatial molecular arrangement at elevated concentrations.

Citation

Journal of Pharmaceutical Sciences

Pub Type

Journals

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Keywords

Research category, Physics, Chemistry->Theroetical chemistry and modeling

Citation

Blanco, M. , Hatch, H. , Curtis, J. and Shen, V. (2018), Evaluating the Effects of Hinge Flexibility on the Solution Structure of Antibodies at Concentrated Conditions, Journal of Pharmaceutical Sciences, [online], https://tsapps.nist.gov/publication/get_pdf.cfm?pub_id=926491 (Accessed April 25, 2024)