mAb Manufacturing & ADCs Cover Image of microscopic cells

mAb Manufacturing & ADCs

mAb Refresher

Monoclonal antibodies (mAbs) are a key component of many biologic medications within the pharmaceutical industry.

Fun Fact: mAbs are BIG molecules! An antibody is roughly 1,250 times bigger than an aspirin molecule!

Antibodies & mAbs

Antibodies are proteins that the body’s immune system makes to protect itself from foreign substances called antigens.

mAbs are clones, or copies, of an antibody that binds to a specific antigen. This specificity is what makes mAbs so powerful! They seek out a certain antigen and bind to it. Once bound to the antigen, the antibody can destroy the toxin. This produces the symptom relief that patients experience from a given mAb medication!

mAb Building Blocks

Remember that DNA is the building block of life!

DNA in cells carries the instructions for how the body links amino acids to form polypeptides. These polypeptides then fold and form 3D structures called proteins. Monoclonal antibodies are just one example of many proteins the body produces.

 

mAb Components

mAbs consist of heavy chains (HC), light chains (LC), fragment antigen-binding (Fab) domains, and a fragment crystallizable (Fc) domain.

Each of these regions can be designed to contain specific sequences to allow it to bind various types of immune cells and antigens.

Diagram of mAB manufacturing

Fun Fact: The chains of antibodies are linked together by disulfide bonds. These sulfur-sulfur bonds are also the present in curly hair! Hair straighteners use heat to break these bonds and remove curls/waves from strands of hair.

mAb Manufacturing & ADCs

As we just established, mAbs are highly complex molecules, so it shouldn’t surprise you that they are manufacturing using a very sophisticated process. Let’s refresh on how mAbs are made as well as some of the other applications of mAbs!

3 main steps of mAB manufacturing

Fun Fact: ADCs are commonly used/researched for treating cancer. Existing treatments like chemotherapy aren’t specific in the cells they target, so ADCs can provide symptom relief with less negative side effects by targeting only the cancer cells.

 

Antibody Drug Conjugates

Some biologics consist only of the mAb, but other products pair the mAb with a small molecule via a linker to allow the mAb to provide a targeted dose of an API, these are called Antibody Drug Conjugates, or ADCs.

In ADCs, the mAb binds to a specific receptor on the cells of interest and then releases the small molecule toxin (sometimes called a payload or warhead) into the cell. This results in the toxin preventing the cell from replicating its DNA, meaning that the cell cannot reproduce and continue to spread in the body!

Diagram detailing the components of an Antibody Drug Conjugate

Learn more about our mAb manufacturing capabilities.

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