Facilitating Drug Discovery with HDX-Mass Spectrometry

Scientists are always on the hunt for new analytical approaches that will streamline the biotherapeutic characterization process and answer questions found intractable using traditional methodologies. One such technique, hydrogen deuterium exchange mass spectrometry (HDX-MS)—a biophysical tool for characterizing protein conformation and dynamics—has become an indispensable method to answer important questions concerning therapeutic protein structure, stability, and interactions. Additionally, the correlation of HDX-MS profiles for a target protein interacting with a panel of ligands has facilitated the determination of structure-function relationships, and differentiated new ligand classes based on selective binding.