Trevor J. Hallam

Production of site-specific antibody-drug conjugates using optimized non-natural amino acids in a cell-free expression system.

Antibody-drug conjugates (ADCs) are a targeted chemotherapeutic currently at the cutting edge of oncology medicine. These hybrid molecules consist of a tumor antigen-specific antibody coupled to a chemotherapeutic small molecule. Through targeted delivery of potent cytotoxins, ADCs exhibit improved therapeutic index and enhanced efficacy relative to traditional chemotherapies and monoclonal antibody therapies. The currently FDA-approved ADCs, Kadcyla (Immunogen/Roche) and Adcetris (Seattle Genetics), are produced by conjugation to surface-exposed lysines, or partial disulfide reduction and conjugation to free cysteines, respectively. These stochastic modes of conjugation lead to heterogeneous drug products with varied numbers of drugs conjugated across several possible sites. As a consequence, the field has limited understanding of the relationships between the site and extent of drug loading and ADC attributes such as efficacy, safety, pharmacokinetics, and immunogenicity. A robust platform for rapid production of ADCs with defined and uniform sites of drug conjugation would enable such studies. We have established a cell-free protein expression system for production of antibody drug conjugates through site-specific incorporation of the optimized non-natural amino acid, para-azidomethyl-l-phenylalanine (pAMF). By using our cell-free protein synthesis platform to directly screen a library of aaRS variants, we have discovered a novel variant of the Methanococcus jannaschii tyrosyl tRNA synthetase (TyrRS), with a high activity and specificity toward pAMF. We demonstrate that site-specific incorporation of pAMF facilitates near complete conjugation of a DBCO-PEG-monomethyl auristatin (DBCO-PEG-MMAF) drug to the tumor-specific, Her2-binding IgG Trastuzumab using strain-promoted azide-alkyne cycloaddition (SPAAC) copper-free click chemistry. The resultant ADCs proved highly potent in in vitro cell cytotoxicity assays.

Engineering toward a bacterial "endoplasmic reticulum" for the rapid expression of immunoglobulin proteins.

Antibodies are well-established as therapeutics, and the preclinical and clinical pipeline of these important biologics is growing rapidly. Consequently, there is considerable interest in technologies to engineer and manufacture them. Mammalian cell culture is commonly used for production because eukaryotic expression systems have evolved complex and efficient chaperone systems for the folding of antibodies. However, given the ease and manipulability of bacteria, antibody discovery efforts often employ bacterial expression systems despite their limitations in generating high titers of functional antibody. Open-Cell Free Synthesis (OCFS) is a coupled transcription-translation system that has the advantages of prokaryotic systems while achieving high titers of antibody expression. Due to the open nature of OCFS, it is easily modified by chemical or protein additives to improve the folding of select proteins. As such, we undertook a protein additive screen to identify chaperone proteins that improve the folding and assembly of trastuzumab in OCFS. From the screen, we identified the disulfide isomerase DsbC and the prolyl isomerase FkpA as important positive effectors of IgG folding. These periplasmic chaperones function synergistically for the folding and assembly of IgG, and, when present in sufficient quantities, gram per liter IgG titers can be produced. This technological advancement allows the rapid development and manufacturing of immunoglobulin proteins and pushes OCFS to the forefront of production technologies for biologics.

In vitro Fab display: a cell-free system for IgG discovery

Selection technologies such as ribosome display enable the rapid discovery of novel antibody fragments entirely in vitro. It has been assumed that the open nature of the cell-free reactions used in these technologies limits selections to single-chain protein fragments. We present a simple approach for the selection of multi-chain proteins, such as antibody Fab fragments, using ribosome display. Specifically, we show that a two-chain trastuzumab (Herceptin) Fab domain can be displayed in a format which tethers either the heavy or light chain to the ribosome while retaining functional antigen binding. Then, we constructed synthetic Fab HC and LC libraries and performed test selections against carcinoembryonic antigen (CEA) and vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF). The Fab selection output was reformatted into full-length immunoglobulin Gs (IgGs) and directly expressed at high levels in an optimized cell-free system for immediate screening, purification and characterization. Several novel IgGs were identified using this cell-free platform that bind to purified CEA, CEA positive cells and VEGF.

Production of bispecific antibodies in “knobs-into-holes” using a cell-free expression system

Bispecific antibodies have emerged in recent years as a promising field of research for therapies in oncology, inflammable diseases, and infectious diseases. Their capability of dual target recognition allows for novel therapeutic hypothesis to be tested, where traditional mono-specific antibodies would lack the needed mode of target engagement. Among extremely diverse architectures of bispecific antibodies, knobs-into-holes (KIHs) technology, which involves engineering CH3 domains to create either a “knob” or a “hole” in each heavy chain to promote heterodimerization, has been widely applied. Here, we describe the use of a cell-free expression system (Xpress CF) to produce KIH bispecific antibodies in multiple scaffolds, including 2-armed heterodimeric scFv-KIH and one-armed asymmetric BiTE-KIH with tandem scFv. Efficient KIH production can be achieved by manipulating the plasmid ratio between knob and hole, and further improved by addition of prefabricated knob or hole. These studies demonstrate the versatility of Xpress CF in KIH production and provide valuable insights into KIH construct design for better assembly and expression titer.

A simplified and robust protocol for immunoglobulin expression in Escherichia coli cell‐free protein synthesis systems

Cell‐free protein synthesis (CFPS) systems allow for robust protein expression with easy manipulation of conditions to improve protein yield and folding. Recent technological developments have significantly increased the productivity and reduced the operating costs of CFPS systems, such that they can compete with conventional in vivo protein production platforms, while also offering new routes for the discovery and production of biotherapeutics. As cell‐free systems have evolved, productivity increases have commonly been obtained by addition of components to previously designed reaction mixtures without careful re‐examination of the essentiality of reagents from previous generations. Here we present a systematic sensitivity analysis of the components in a conventional Escherichia coli CFPS reaction mixture to evaluate their optimal concentrations for production of the immunoglobulin G trastuzumab. We identify eight changes to the system, which result in optimal expression of trastuzumab. We find that doubling the potassium glutamate concentration, while entirely eliminating pyruvate, coenzyme A, NAD, total tRNA, folinic acid, putrescine and ammonium glutamate, results in a highly productive cell‐free system with a 95% reduction in reagent costs (excluding cell‐extract, plasmid, and T7 RNA polymerase made in‐house). A larger panel of other proteins was also tested and all show equivalent or improved yields with our simplified system. Furthermore, we demonstrate that all of the reagents for CFPS can be combined in a single freeze‐thaw stable master mix to improve reliability and ease of use. These improvements are important for the application of the CFPS system in fields such as protein engineering, high‐throughput screening, and biotherapeutics.

RF1 attenuation enables efficient non-natural amino acid incorporation for production of homogeneous antibody drug conjugates

Amber codon suppression for the insertion of non-natural amino acids (nnAAs) is limited by competition with release factor 1 (RF1). Here we describe the genome engineering of a RF1 mutant strain that enhances suppression efficiency during cell-free protein synthesis, without significantly impacting cell growth during biomass production. Specifically, an out membrane protease (OmpT) cleavage site was engineered into the switch loop of RF1, which enables its conditional inactivation during cell lysis. This facilitates extract production without additional processing steps, resulting in a scaleable extract production process. The RF1 mutant extract allows nnAA incorporation at previously intractable sites of an IgG1 and at multiple sites in the same polypeptide chain. Conjugation of cytotoxic agents to these nnAAs, yields homogeneous antibody drug conjugates (ADCs) that can be optimized for conjugation site, drug to antibody ratio (DAR) and linker-warheads designed for efficient tumor killing. This platform provides the means to generate therapeutic ADCs inaccessible by other methods that are efficient in their cytotoxin delivery to tumor with reduced dose-limiting toxicities and thus have the potential for better clinical impact.

A general sequence processing and analysis program for protein engineering.

Protein engineering projects often amass numerous raw DNA sequences, but no readily available software combines sequence processing and activity correlation required for efficient lead identification. XLibraryDisplay is an open source program integrated into Microsoft Excel for Windows that automates batch sequence processing via a simple step-by-step, menu-driven graphical user interface. XLibraryDisplay accepts any DNA template which is used as a basis for trimming, filtering, translating, and aligning hundreds to thousands of sequences (raw, FASTA, or Phred PHD file formats). Key steps for library characterization through lead discovery are available including library composition analysis, filtering by experimental data, graphing and correlating to experimental data, alignment to structural data extracted from PDB files, and generation of PyMOL visualization scripts. Though larger data sets can be handled, the program is best suited for analyzing approximately 10 000 or fewer leads or naïve clones which have been characterized using Sanger sequencing and other experimental approaches. XLibraryDisplay can be downloaded for free from sourceforge.net/projects/xlibrarydisplay/ .

Post-Exposure Protection in Mice against Sudan Virus by a Two Antibody Cocktail

Sudan virus (SUDV) and Ebola viruses (EBOV) are both members of the Ebolavirus genus and have been sources of epidemics and outbreaks for several decades. We present here the generation and characterization of cross-reactive antibodies to both SUDV and EBOV, which were produced in a cell-free system and protective against SUDV in mice. A non-human primate, cynomolgus macaque, was immunized with viral-replicon particles expressing the glycoprotein of SUDV-Boniface (8A). Two separate antibody fragment phage display libraries were constructed after four immunogen injections. Both libraries were screened first against the SUDV and a second library was cross-selected against EBOV-Kikwit. Sequencing of 288 selected clones from the two distinct libraries identified 58 clones with distinct VH and VL sequences. Many of these clones were cross-reactive to EBOV and SUDV and able to neutralize SUDV. Three of these recombinant antibodies (X10B1, X10F3, and X10H2) were produced in the scFv-Fc format utilizing a cell-free production system. Mice that were challenged with SUDV-Boniface receiving 100µg of the X10B1/X10H2 scFv-Fc combination 6 and 48-h post-exposure demonstrated partial protection individually and complete protection as a combination. The data herein suggests these antibodies may be promising candidates for further therapeutic development.

Abstract 67: Characterization and preclinical development of STRO-001, a novel CD74-targeting antibody-drug conjugate (ADC) for the treatment of B-cell malignancies

CD74 is a type II transmembrane glycoprotein involved in the formation and transport of MHC class II protein. CD74 is highly expressed in many B-cell malignancies with limited expression in normal tissues (Stein R. et al., CCR 2007). STRO-001 is a novel CD74-targeting ADC containing an anti-CD74 aglycosylated human IgG1 antibody (SP7219) conjugated to a non-cleavable dibenzocyclooctyne (DBCO)-maytansinoid linker-warhead. SP7219 was discovered from a Fab ribosome display library based on Sutro’s Xpress CFTM technology. Highly efficient site-specific conjugation enabled by our cell-free antibody production and click chemistry results in a well-defined homogeneous ADC drug product with a drug-antibody ratio (DAR) of 2. Conjugation sites were selected based on highest stability both in vitro and in vivo, thereby limiting loss of drug moiety from STRO-001 in circulation. Due to its limited cell permeability, the major catabolite released by STRO-001 has 1000X lower cell killing activity on CD74 positive and negative cells compared to the reference cytotoxic maytansine. In vitro cytotoxicity assays show potent activity of STRO-001 in a diverse panel of B-cell tumor lines including 4 multiple myeloma (MM), 9 germinal center B-cell (GCB) diffuse large B-cell lymphoma (DLBCL), 3 activated B-cell (ABC) DLBCL, and 3 mantle cell lymphoma (MCL) cell lines with IC50 ranging from 0.17-20 nM. CD74 cell surface expression is required for STRO-001 cytotoxic activity but expression level, as measured by antibody-binding capacity, does not correlate with in vitro potency (R2=0.4640). STRO-001 inhibits the formation of visceral tumors (p 90 days). STRO-001 exhibits dose-dependent tumor growth inhibition in SU-DHL-6 xenografts starting at 2.5 mg/kg weekly x 3 doses. The combination of bendamustine/rituximab (BR) + STRO-001 further improves tumor suppression in SU-DHL-6 xenografts compared to vehicle (p = 0.002) or BR alone (p = 0.02). Preliminary studies with a MCL xenograft model, Jeko-1, demonstrate potent anti-tumor activity compared to vehicle (p Citation Format: Cristina Abrahams, Xiaofan Li, Venita DeAlmeida, Millicent Embry, Abigail Yu, Stellanie Krim, Heidi Hoffmann, James Zawada, Maureen Bruhns, Shannon Matheny, Stuart Bussell, Toni Kline, Alice Yam, Ryan Stafford, Trevor Hallam, Mark Lupher, Arturo Molina. Characterization and preclinical development of STRO-001, a novel CD74-targeting antibody-drug conjugate (ADC) for the treatment of B-cell malignancies [abstract]. In: Proceedings of the American Association for Cancer Research Annual Meeting 2017; 2017 Apr 1-5; Washington, DC. Philadelphia (PA): AACR; Cancer Res 2017;77(13 Suppl):Abstract nr 67. doi:10.1158/1538-7445.AM2017-67