F-star Therapeutics has entered a collaboration with Protein Stable to explore the company’s SUPR-CM platform for early development, lead selection, formulation development and stability prediction.
Jon Armer, Formulation Lead Senior Scientist at F-star said: “At F-star, we are developing next generation tetravalent bispecifics for cancer immunotherapy which we create in a unique manner to maintain the natural antibody format. It is hoped that we will be able to leverage the many advantages of the SUPR-CM platform to allow us to better understand our molecules at an earlier stage improving the chances of success for the development of our programs, whilst shrinking timelines and resource requirements”.
The ability to predict the stability of molecules in development is an important tool for scientists. Chemical melt methodology (leading to the transition point, Cm) is increasingly being adopted as a more representative predictor of stability; the ability of a molecule to re-fold following denaturation has been strongly linked to its likelihood to degrade under real-world stability conditions.
However, as chemical melts require multiple reagents to be prepared including the denaturant, stabilising agents under evaluation and samples, its laborious and prone to pipetting errors, extensive measurement times and poor repeatability. Transfers to vials or capillaries for analysis adds extra steps and can be expensive, especially with proprietary consumables.
This means that many scientists who could adopt the method actively avoided doing so. In time the value that Cm profiling has offered to drug development has waned due to the complexity of the setup, the companies say. This hurdle, despite the clear data-rich information it offers, limits its use in a practical sense. The SUPR-CM offers a chemical melt solution that solves all of these issues, Protein Stable claims, and allows researchers to adopt the method to complement DSC or other thermal denaturation methods or to generate data at stages of the project where alternative methods cannot be used.