Analysis of Drug-to-Antibody Ratio in Antibody-Drug Conjugates—Multifaceted Evaluation by LC-QTOF and MALDI Analysis—

User Benefits

- The MALDI-8030 system enables drug/antibody ratios to be evaluated quickly and easily. - The high mass stability of the LCMS-9030 system enables reliable evaluations of intra-day and inter-day drug-to-antibody ratios of antibody-drug conjugates. - Using the MALDI-8030 and LCMS-9030 systems together to analyze the same antibody-drug conjugate enables multifaceted evaluations of antibody-drug conjugates.

Introduction

Antibody-drug conjugates (ADC) are biopharmaceuticals with a linker that links a monoclonal antibody (mAb) to a cytotoxic drug (payload). Since ADCs offer both the high cancer specificity of mAbs and the cancer cell lethality of payload drugs, they are attracting attention as a new type of therapeutic drug for fighting cancer. Consequently, pharmaceutical manufacturers around the world have been actively engaged in developing them. The efficacy of ADCs depends greatly on their drug-to-antibody ratio (DAR), which is expressed by the number of payloads per mAb molecule. Therefore, it is necessary to evaluate their DAR as a parameter for analyzing their ADC properties. This Application News article describes a multifaceted evaluation of the same ADC sample using a benchtop MALDI-8030 linear matrix-assisted laser desorption/ionization time-of-flight mass spectrometer system and an LCMS-9030 quadrupole time-of-flight mass spectrometer system. The LCMS-9030 was also used to evaluate the intra-day and inter-day precision of DAR values.

July 22, 2025 GMT