A New Bispecific Antibody Platform

Nature Biotechnolgy. 2014 v32(2):191-8.
Generation of bispecific IgG antibodies by structure-based design of an orthogonal Fab interface.
Lewis SM, Wu X, Pustilnik A, Sereno A, Huang F, Rick HL, Guntas G, Leaver-Fay A, Smith EM, Ho C, Hansen-Estruch C, Chamberlain AK, Truhlar SM, Conner EM, Atwell S, Kuhlman B, Demarest SJ.

Robust generation of IgG bispecific antibodies has been a long-standing challenge. Existing methods require extensive engineering of each individual antibody, discovery of common light chains, or complex and laborious biochemical processing. Here we combine computational and rational design approaches with experimental structural validation to generate antibody heavy and light chains with orthogonal Fab interfaces. Parental monoclonal antibodies incorporating these interfaces, when simultaneously co-expressed, assemble into bispecific IgG with improved heavy chain-light chain pairing. Bispecific IgGs generated with this approach exhibit pharmacokinetic and other desirable properties of native IgG, but bind target antigens monovalently. As such, these bispecific reagents may be useful in many biotechnological applications.