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High Thermal Stability Is Essential for Tumor Targeting of Antibody Fragments

Engineering of a Humanized Anti-epithelial Glycoprotein-2 (Epithelial Cell Adhesion Molecule) Single-Chain Fv Fragment¹

Department of Biochemistry, University of Zürich, CH-8057 Zürich, Switzerland [J. W., A. H., A. P.]; Division of Oncology, Department of Internal Medicine, University Hospital, CH-8044 Zürich, Switzerland [J. W., R. S., U. Z-W.]; and Center for Radiopharmaceutical Science, Paul Scherrer Institute, CH-5232 Villigen (PSI), Switzerland [R. W., P. A. S.]

The epithelial glycoprotein-2 is abundantly expressed on many solid tumors and is a suitable target for antibody-based therapy. In the present study, an antiepithelial glycoprotein-2 single-chain Fv (scFv) was derived from the hybridoma MOC31 by phage display. Despite its high affinity (K_D = 3.9 x 10^-9 M), however, this antibody fragment failed to significantly enrich at lung tumor xenografts in mice, mostly because of its insufficient thermal stability. To overcome this limitation, the antigen-binding residues of the MOC31 scFv fragment were grafted onto the framework of the highly stable and well-folding anti-c-erbB2 scFv 4D5. Further modification of the resulting 4D5 MOC-A, which was performed by transferring eight additional residues of the heavy chain variable domain core of the parent MOC31 antibody, produced 4D5 MOC-B, resulting in increased serum stability at 37°C and also significantly improved expression behavior while retaining the antigen specificity and affinity of the parent MOC31 scFv. In mice, the scFv 4D5 MOC-B, which was radiolabeled with ^99mtechnetium using a new histidine-tag specific labeling method (Waibel et al., Nature Biotechnol., 17: 897–901, 1999), showed favorable blood clearance and efficient enriches at lung tumor xenografts, with a tumor:blood ratio of 5.25 and a total dose of 1.47% injected dose per gram after 24 h. Biophysical properties such as high thermal stability are thus decisive for whether these molecules are useful in vivo, and our approach may provide a general strategy to solve this problem. This is also the first report of using a humanized anti-EGP-2 scFv in vivo for targeting solid tumors, which is a promising targeting moiety for the diagnostics and therapy of EGP-2-positive tumors in patients.

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