Optimizing Sialic Acid Clone Screening Through A High-Throughput Lectin Assay

By Sewon Park, Yingji Jin, and Janet Lee, Cell Line Development Group, Samsung Biologics

From a manufacturing perspective, controlling the degree of sialylation for a product is crucial, as it has an outsized impact on the quality and stability of therapeutic glycoproteins.

While the traditional high-performance analytical methods used to evaluate glycosylation offer operators high accuracy, their throughput limitations can create time and cost constraints that may hinder development. Additionally, these methods can typically only be utilized during the later stages of cell line screening and require high concentrations of purified protein.

Conversely, many existing high-throughput methods for quantifying sialic acids possess their own limitations, as these approaches often offer low accuracy or specificity when compared to high-performance methods. To overcome these challenges, Samsung Biologics’ Cell Line Development Group has implemented a novel high-throughput screening method for analyzing a molecule’s sialic acid profile by measuring its binding affinity with lectin. For this assay, lectins, sugar-binding proteins highly specific to their associated sugar moieties, are leveraged to improve specificity. The result is an easy-to-use protocol that requires lower sample concentrations without the need for purification, and which can screen large pools of clones faster and more efficiently than incumbent methods.