1. Spontaneous Isopeptide Bond Formation as a Powerful Tool for Engineering Site-Specific Antibody-Drug Conjugates
- Author
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Thomas Eichhorn, Stefan Becker, Ulrich A. K. Betz, Vanessa Siegmund, Lars Toleikis, Bijan Zakeri, Carl Deutsch, Frank Fischer, Birgit Piater, Björn Hock, and Harald Kolmar
- Subjects
0301 basic medicine ,Drug ,Scaffold ,Immunoconjugates ,media_common.quotation_subject ,010402 general chemistry ,01 natural sciences ,Antibody labeling ,Article ,Antibodies ,03 medical and health sciences ,chemistry.chemical_compound ,Peptide synthesis ,Technology, Pharmaceutical ,media_common ,chemistry.chemical_classification ,Isopeptide bond ,Multidisciplinary ,biology ,Chemical Engineering ,Combinatorial chemistry ,0104 chemical sciences ,Specific antibody ,030104 developmental biology ,Pharmaceutical Preparations ,chemistry ,Biochemistry ,biology.protein ,Antibody ,Peptides ,Conjugate - Abstract
Spontaneous isopeptide bond formation, a stabilizing posttranslational modification that can be found in gram-positive bacterial cell surface proteins, has previously been used to develop a peptide-peptide ligation technology that enables the polymerization of tagged-proteins catalyzed by SpyLigase. Here we adapted this technology to establish a novel modular antibody labeling approach which is based on isopeptide bond formation between two recognition peptides, SpyTag and KTag. Our labeling strategy allows the attachment of a reporting cargo of interest to an antibody scaffold by fusing it chemically to KTag, available via semi-automated solid-phase peptide synthesis (SPPS), while equipping the antibody with SpyTag. This strategy was successfully used to engineer site-specific antibody-drug conjugates (ADCs) that exhibit cytotoxicities in the subnanomolar range. Our approach may lead to a new class of antibody conjugates based on peptide-tags that have minimal effects on protein structure and function, thus expanding the toolbox of site-specific antibody conjugation.
- Published
- 2016
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