The European Medicines Agency received recently the first marketing authorization application for a biosimilar monoclonal antibody (mAb) and adopted the final guidelines on biosimilar mAbs and Fc-fusion proteins. The agency requires high similarity between biosimilar and reference products for approval. Specifically, the amino acid sequences must be identical. The glycosylation pattern of the antibody is also often considered to be a very important quality attribute due to its strong effect on quality, safety, immunogenicity, pharmacokinetics and potency. Here, we describe a case study of cetuximab, which has been marketed since 2004. Biosimilar versions of the product are now in the pipelines of numerous therapeutic antibody biosimilar developers. We applied a combination of intact, middle-down, middle-up and bottom-up electrospray ionization and matrix assisted laser desorption ionization mass spectrometry techniques to characterize the amino acid sequence and major post-translational modifications of the marketed cetuximab product, with special emphasis on glycosylation. Our results revealed a sequence error in the reported sequence of the light chain in databases and in publications, thus highlighting the potency of mass spectrometry to establish correct antibody sequences. We were also able to achieve a comprehensive identification of cetuximab’s glycoforms and glycosylation profile assessment on both Fab and Fc domains. Taken together, the reported approaches and data form a solid framework for the comparability of antibodies and their biosimilar candidates that could be further applied to routine structural assessments of these and other antibody-based products.

In-depth site-specific investigations of protein glycosylation are the basis for understanding the biological function of glycoproteins. Mass spectrometry-based N- and O-glycopeptide analyses enable determination of the glycosylation site, site occupancy, as well as glycan varieties present on a particular site. However, the depth of information is highly dependent on the applied analytical tools, including glycopeptide fragmentation regimes and automated data analysis. Here, we used a small set of synthetic disialylated, biantennary N-glycopeptides to systematically tune Q-TOF instrument parameters towards optimal energy stepping collision induced dissociation (CID) of glycopeptides. A linear dependency of m/z-ratio and optimal fragmentation energy was found, showing that with increasing m/z-ratio, more energy is required for glycopeptide fragmentation. Based on these optimized fragmentation parameters, a method combining lower- and higher-energy CID was developed, allowing the online acquisition of glycan and peptide-specific fragments within a single tandem MS experiment. We validated this method analyzing a set of human immunoglobulins (IgA1+2, sIgA, IgG1+2, IgE, IgD, IgM) as well as bovine fetuin. These optimized fragmentation parameters also enabled software-assisted glycopeptide assignment of both N- and O-glycopeptides including information about the most abundant glycan compositions, peptide sequence and putative structures. Twenty-six out of 30 N-glycopeptides and four out of five O-glycopeptides carrying >110 different glycoforms could be identified by this optimized LC-ESI tandem MS method with minimal user input. The Q-TOF based glycopeptide analysis platform presented here opens the way to a range of different applications in glycoproteomics research as well as biopharmaceutical development and quality control.Graphical AbstractᅟElectronic supplementary materialThe online version of this article (doi:10.1007/s13361-015-1308-6) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

One of the principal goals of glycoprotein research is to correlate glycan structure and function. Such correlation is necessary in order for one to understand the mechanisms whereby glycoprotein structure elaborates the functions of myriad proteins. The accurate comparison of glycoforms and quantification of glycosites are essential steps in this direction. Mass spectrometry has emerged as a powerful analytical technique in the field of glycoprotein characterization. Its sensitivity, high dynamic range, and mass accuracy provide both quantitative and se-