Dr. Sheng Ye’ group published a research article entitled “A Rational Approach to Enhancing Antibody Fc Homodimer Formation for Robust Production of Antibody Mixture in a Single Cell Line” on the Journal of Biological Chemistry on September 6, 2017.

Antibody mixtures, which offer targeting of more than one antigens, are becoming a promising strategy for treatment of different diseases. However, approaches forproduction of antibody mixtures face a number of challenges. In this study, by taking advantage of the electrostatic steering mechanism, we rationally engineered the Fc region of antibody by altering the charge complementarity at the CH3 dimerization interface, such that attractive electrostatic interactions would favor Fc homodimer formation, whereas repulsive charged interactions would disfavor Fc heterodimer formation.This platform, which we called Mix-mAb, resolves the different heavy-chain mispairing issue,allowing production of antibody mixtures consisting of two homodimersin a single cell line, andthus broadens our options for manufacturingmore effective antibody-based therapeutic agents.

Schematic illustrating the rationale to generate two monoclonal antibodies

 in a single cell line by altering the overall charge complementarity

Link: http://www.jbc.org/content/early/2017/09/06/jbc.M116.771188