About

The need for rapid manufacture of protein-based biopharmaceuticals has increased the importance of the development of tools for measuring, understanding and predicting the behavior of therapeutic proteins, particularly monoclonal antibodies (mAbs). Driven by clinical pressures during the COVID-19 pandemic, many companies accelerated the development of therapeutic antibodies for clinical evaluation and manufacture to a very few months. Many research groups are working on different aspects of structural stability (and, hence functionality) of mAbs. Adsorption and desorption of mAbs are critical indicators of mAb instability/stability and of their potential to form aggregated particles. The capacity to predict the stability of protein biopharmaceuticals will be accelerated by establishment of a specific forum for academic and industrial research communities to exchange knowledge about technical assessment of adsorption and desorption and understand how stability underpins molecular design. Through BBSRC support, we will run an expert workshop that will disseminate academia-led tool development and share advances in understanding the stability of therapeutic proteins. We aim to establish this workshop as a biannual event to develop a multi-disciplinary community of researchers, building from the expertise at the University of Manchester (https://sites.manchester.ac.uk/coebp/) and supported by complementarity with BioProNet2, a bioprocessing industry-academic networking club sponsored by industry (http://biopronetuk.org/).