Interaction of clinical-stage antibodies with heme predicts their physiochemical and binding qualities

Abstract

Lecerf et al. examine over 100 samples with variable region sequences matching clinical-stage immunoglobulin antibodies, to demonstrate that many interact with heme. They find that those that do interact with heme possess specific sequence traits that manifest qualities such as increased hydrophobicity, self-binding and intrinsic polyreactivity, thus suggesting that heme interaction is a predictor for therapeutically important qualities.