An adaptive soft‐sensor for advanced real‐time monitoring of an antibody‐drug conjugation reaction

Abstract In the production of antibody‐drug conjugates (ADCs), the conjugation reaction is a central step defining the final product composition and, hence, directly affecting product safety and efficacy. To enable real‐time monitoring, spectroscopic sensors in combination with multivariate regression models have gained popularity in recent years. The extended Kalman filter (EKF) can be used as so‐called soft‐sensor to fuse sensor predictions with long‐horizon forecasts by process models. This enables the dynamic update of the current state and provides increased robustness against experimental noise or model errors. Due to the uncertainty associated with sensor and process models in biopharmaceutical applications, the deployment of such soft‐sensors is challenging. In this study, we demonstrate the combination of an uncertainty‐aware sensor model with a kinetic reaction model using an EKF to monitor a site‐directed ADC conjugation reaction. As the sensor model, a Gaussian process regression model is presented to realize a time‐variant determination of the sensor uncertainty. The EKF fuses the time‐discrete predictions of the amount of conjugated drug from the sensor model with the time‐continuous predictions from the kinetic model. While the ADC species are not distinguishable by on‐line recorded UV/Vis spectra, the developed soft‐sensor is able to dynamically update all relevant reaction species. It could be shown that the use of time‐variant process and sensor noise computation approaches improved the performance of the EKF and achieved a reduction of the prediction error of up to 23% compared with the kinetic model. The developed framework proved to enhance robustness against noisy sensor measurements or wrong model initialization and was successfully transferred from batch to fed‐batch mode. In future, this framework could be implemented for model‐based process control and be adopted for other ADC conjugation reaction types.