Rapid Quantification of Monoclonal Antibody Titer in Cell Culture Harvests by Antibody-Induced Z-ELP-E2 Nanoparticle Cross-Linking.

Existing assays for the quantification of monoclonal antibody (mAb) cell culture titer often require expensive instruments or reagents and may be limited by the low-throughput or tedious protocols. Here, we developed a quick and cost-effective alternative assay based on mAb-induced cross-linking with Z-domain-ELP-E2 nanocages functionalized by SpyTag/SpyCatcher conjugation. After mixing mAb samples with a fixed nanoparticle concentration for 10 min, we found that the turbidity, measured by absorbance at 600 nm, exhibited a high-signal-to-background ratio and was proportional to the mAb concentration. A simple logarithmic regression was found to fit ( R2 = 0.99) the turbidity data for mAb concentrations between 100 and 1000 μg/mL. The optimized assay procedure was validated using two industrial mAb cell culture harvests, and a bridging study using Octet biolayer interferometry with Protein A sensors confirmed accurate and reproducible results. The assay procedure can be easily adapted to a high-throughput format for rapid mAb titer screening.