Generation of stable cell clones expressing mixtures of human antibodies

Therapeutic monoclonal antibodies, a highly successful class of biological drugs, are conventionally manufactured in mammalian cell lines. A recent approach to increase the therapeutic effectiveness of monoclonal antibodies has been to combine two or more of them; however this increases the complexity of development and manufacture. To address this issue a method to efficiently express multiple monoclonal antibodies from a single cell has been developed and we describe here the generation of stable cell clones that express high levels of a human monoclonal antibody mixture. PER.C6 cells were transfected with a combination of plasmids containing genes encoding three different antibodies. Clones that express the three corresponding antibody specificities were identified, subcloned, and passaged in the absence of antibiotic selection pressure. At several time points, batch production runs were analyzed for stable growth and IgG production characteristics. The majority (11/12) of subclones analyzed expressed all three antibody specificities in constant ratios with total IgG productivity ranging between 15 and 20 pg/cell/day under suboptimal culture conditions after up to 67 population doublings. The growth and IgG production characteristics of the stable clones reported here resemble those of single monoclonal antibody cell lines from conventional clone generation programs. We conclude that the methodology described here is applicable to the generation of stable PER.C6(R) clones for industrial scale production of mixtures of antibodies.

Human immunoglobulin repertoires against tetanus toxoid contain a large and diverse fraction of high-affinity promiscuous V(H) genes

To study the contribution of antibody light (L) chains to the diversity and binding properties of immune repertoires, a phage display repertoire was constructed from a single human antibody L chain and a large collection of antibody heavy (H) chains harvested from the blood of two human donors immunized with tetanus toxoid (TT) vaccine. After selection for binding to TT, 129 unique antibodies representing 53 variable immunoglobulin H chain (V(H)) gene rearrangements were isolated. This panel of anti-TT antibodies restricted to a single variable immunoglobulin L chain (V(L)) could be organized into 17 groups binding non-competing epitopes on the TT molecule. Comparison of the V(H) regions in this V(L)-restricted panel with a previously published repertoire of anti-TT V(H) regions with cognate V(H)-V(L) pairing showed a very similar distribution of V(H), D(H) and J(H) gene segment utilization and length of the complementarity-determining region 3 of the H chain. Surface plasmon resonance analysis of the single-V(L) anti-TT repertoire unveiled a range of affinities, with a median monovalent affinity of 2 nM. When the single-V(L) anti-TT V(H) repertoire was combined with a collection of naïve V(L) regions and again selected for binding to TT, many of the V(H) genes were recovered in combination with a diversity of V(L) regions. The affinities of a panel of antibodies consisting of a single promiscuous anti-TT V(H) combined with 15 diverse V(L) chains were determined and found to be identical to each other and to the original isolate restricted to a single-V(L) chain. Based on previous estimates of the clonal size of the human anti-TT repertoire, we conclude that up to 25% of human anti-TT-encoding V(H) regions from an immunized repertoire have promiscuous features. These V(H) regions readily combine with a single antibody L chain to result in a large panel of anti-TT antibodies that conserve the expected epitope diversity, V(H) region diversity and affinity of a natural repertoire.