LC/MS/MS Bioanalysis of Protein–Drug Conjugates—The Importance of Incorporating Succinimide Hydrolysis Products

Bioanalysis of antibody-drug conjugates (ADCs) is challenging due to the complex, heterogeneous nature of their structures and their complicated catabolism. To fully describe the pharmacokinetics (PK) of an ADC, several analytes are commonly quantified, including total antibody, conjugate, and payload. Among them, conjugate is the most challenging to measure, because it requires detection of both small and large molecules as one entity. Existing approaches to quantify the conjugated species of ADCs involve a ligand binding assay (LBA) for conjugated antibody or hybrid LBA/liquid chromatography/tandem mass spectrometry (LC/MS/MS) for quantitation of conjugated drug. In our current work for a protein-drug conjugate (PDC) using the Centyrin scaffold, a similar concept to ADCs but with smaller protein size, an alternative method to quantify the conjugate by using a surrogate peptide approach, was utilized. The His-tagged proteins were isolated from biological samples using immobilized metal affinity chromatography (IMAC), followed by trypsin digestion. The tryptic peptide containing the linker attached to the payload was used as a surrogate of the conjugate and monitored by LC/MS/MS analysis. During method development and its application, we found that hydrolysis of the succinimide ring of the linker was ubiquitous, taking place at many stages during the lifetime of the PDC including in the initial drug product, in vivo in circulation in the animals, and ex vivo during the trypsin digestion step of the sample preparation. We have shown that hydrolysis during trypsin digestion is concentration-independent and consistent during the work flow-therefore, having no impact on assay performance. However, for samples that have undergone extensive hydrolysis prior to trypsin digestion, significant bias could be introduced if only the non-hydrolyzed form is considered in the quantitation. Therefore, it is important to incorporate succinimide hydrolysis products in the quantitation method in order to provide an accurate estimation of the total conjugate level. More importantly, the LC/MS/MS-based method described here provides a useful tool to quantitatively evaluate succinimide hydrolysis of ADCs in vivo, which has been previously reported to have significant impact on their stability, exposure, and efficacy.