N-glycosylation analysis of biopharmaceuticals by multicapillary gel electrophoresis: Generation and application of a new glucose unit database

Abstract

As glycomics research is gaining momentum in the biopharmaceutical industry, there is an increasing need for reproducible high throughput glycoanalytical methods to monitor and characterize the N-glycosylation of therapeutic glycoproteins. Since the glycosylation pattern of glycobiotherapeutics influences their important biological functions, approaches to comprehensively analyze these complex molecules is of high importance. This paper reports on the use of multicapillary gel electrophoresis in high throughput analysis of fluorophore labeled partitioned N-glycan libraries to generate a new glucose unit database that was consequently applied to identify the carbohydrate structures of two high profile biopharmaceuticals, adalimumab and etanercept.

Keywords: Biotherapeutics; Capillary electrophoresis; Glycans.