Validation of a Size-Exclusion LC Method and Assessment of rhEPO in Pharmaceutical Formulations by Liquid Chromatography and Biological Assay

Size exclusion chromatography of biopharmaceutical products: From current practices for proteins to emerging trends for viral vectors, nucleic acids and lipid nanoparticles

The 21st century has been particularly productive for the biopharmaceutical industry, with the introduction of several classes of innovative therapeutics, such as monoclonal antibodies and related compounds, gene therapy products, and RNA-based modalities. All these new molecules are susceptible to aggregation and fragmentation, which necessitates a size variant analysis for their comprehensive characterization. Size exclusion chromatography (SEC) is one of the reference techniques that can be applied. The analytical techniques for mAbs are now well established and some of them are now emerging for the newer modalities. In this context, the objective of this review article is: i) to provide a short historical background on SEC, ii) to suggest some clear guidelines on the selection of packing material and mobile phase for successful method development in modern SEC; and iii) to highlight recent advances in SEC, such as the use of narrow-bore and micro-bore columns, ultra-wide pore columns, and low-adsorption column hardware. Some important innovations, such as recycling SEC, the coupling of SEC with mass spectrometry, and the use of alternative detectors such as charge detection mass spectrometry and mass photometry are also described. In addition, this review discusses the use of SEC in multidimensional setups and shows some of the most recent advances at the preparative scale. In the third part of the article, the possibility of SEC for the characterization of new modalities is also reviewed. The final objective of this review is to provide a clear summary of opportunities and limitations of SEC for the analysis of different biopharmaceutical products.

Trends in the Analysis of Biopharmaceuticals by HPLC

Background:

Biopharmaceuticals are biological drugs consisting of a complex compound that can be produced by a living organism or derive from it. Biopharmaceuticals are very complicated compounds from structural point of view and for this reason, they cannot be fully characterized in terms of their structure with current analytical methods as it happens instead of low molecular weight chemicals drugs.

Introduction:

The regulatory guidelines require the characterization of the primary or higher sequence of these molecules and the characterization of any post-translational modifications. The use of biopharmaceuticals has really grown in the last few years: in 2016, the number of biopharmaceuticals approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and European Medicines Agency (EMA) for use in humans’ diseases was 1357. From 2013 to 2016, 73 of these compounds were approved for the treatment of cancer, inflammation, immune disorders, infections, anemia and cardiovascular diseases.

Aim/Conclusion:

The aim of the present review is to provide an overview of recent approaches for the characterization of biopharmaceutical products in HPLC that have been presented in the literature in the last years.