11^th European Biosimilars Congress

For most therapeutic glycoproteins the glycosylation patterns correlate strongly with the clinical safety and efficacy profiles. In biological tissues these patterns can also correlate with the state of health or disease of the individual. Given this, there is increasing interest in accurately characterizing changes in glycosylation, for example in Quality by Design studies throughout biopharmaceutical development as well as in glycan biomarker discovery for medical diagnostics. Changes in glycosylation patterns can be complex and subtle and the numbers of samples needed to be analysed can be large, ranging from hundreds to thousands. To perform these studies, reliable systems for high-throughput (HT) glycomics are needed. However, despite many advances in glycosylation analysis there are still problems with current technologies, including low sample throughput, long turnaround times, high cost per sample and labour intensiveness. This talk concerns “LongBow” — a system developed at Ludger for reliable HT glycomics. The “LongBow” system is made up of flexible, modular technologies for semi-automated processing of glycans from a variety of clinical and bio-therapeutic samples and analysis by mass spectrometry (MS) and/or ultrahigh performance liquid chromatography (UHPLC). The focus here will be on permethylated N- and O-glycans analysed by matrix-assisted laser desorption/ionization time-of-flight mass spectrometry (MALDI-TOF-MS). This automated, HT glycan preparation and permethylation method showed to be robust, convenient and fast and can be applied for biopharmaceutical glycan profiling and clinical glycan biomarker studies.