Investigation of the immunogenicity of a protein drug using equilibrium dialysis and liquid chromatography tandem mass spectrometry detection

Biotherapeutics such as protein and peptide drugs have attracted significant attention in the medical community and pharmaceutical industry in recent years. Immunogenicity is one of the major concerns in the development and application of biotherapeutics. Although great efforts have been put forth in reducing immunogenicity, monitoring the free ("active") drug concentration and the antibody formation is critical for preclinical and clinical studies. Currently, it is still a challenging task to have a standardized test method monitoring immunogenicity when biotherapeutic compounds such as proteins and peptides are administrated. Combined with liquid chromatography/tandem mass spectrometry detection, the equilibrium dialysis technique that is conventionally used for measuring the free and bound concentration of small organic molecules was extended to the application of measuring the free and bound concentrations of a protein drug with a relative molecular mass over 10 000 from plasma samples containing antibody. This novel approach could also be used for accurately measuring the antibody concentration when a reference standard of the antibody is available.