Exposing the molecular heterogeneity of glycosylated biotherapeutics

Abstract

Glycosylated biotherapeutics are an emerging class of drugs with high molecular heterogeneity, which can affect their safety and efficacy. Characterizing this heterogeneity is crucial for drug development and quality assessment, but existing methods are limited in their ability to analyze intact glycoproteins. Here, we present a new approach to glycoform fingerprinting that uses proton-transfer charge-reduction with gas-phase fractionation to analyze intact glycoproteins by mass spectrometry. The method provides a detailed landscape of the intact molecular weights present in biotherapeutic protein preparations in a single experiment and offers insights into glycoform composition when coupled with a suitable bioinformatic strategy. We tested the approach on various biotherapeutic molecules, including Fc-fusion, VHH-fusion, and peptide-bound MHC class II complexes to demonstrate efficacy in measuring the proteoform-level diversity of biotherapeutics. Notably, we inferred the glycoform distribution for hundreds of molecular weights for the eight-times glycosylated fusion drug IL22-Fc, enabling correlations between glycoform sub-populations and the drug’s pharmacological properties. Our method is broadly applicable and provides a powerful tool to assess the molecular heterogeneity of emerging biotherapeutics.