Dr. Harold W. Hatch

Chemical Engineer

Chemical Science Division,

National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST)

Gaithersburg, MD

 

Host:  Dr. David Corti

 

Website

Personal Website
 

Dr. Hatch received a B.S. in Chemical Engineering under mentorship of Henry Ashbaugh at Tulane University, a Ph.D. under mentorship of Pablo Debenedetti and Frank Stillinger at Princeton University, and a 2013 NRC postdoctoral fellowship at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) advised by Vincent Shen, leading to a career position at NIST where he uses specialized molecular simulation techniques to study phase equilibrium, adsorption, self-assembly, and physical stability of biological materials.

 

Although monoclonal antibodies (mAbs) are some of the most profitable and promising pharmaceuticals for targeted therapies, physical instabilities at high concentration including aggregation, high viscosity and phase separation cause problems for their manufacture, delivery to patients and long term stability. In this work, we present a multiscale methodology which uses all-atom modeling and experimental second osmotic virial coefficients to develop coarse-grained models for Monte Carlo simulations of hundreds of mAbs with Angstrom-level resolution. In this multiscale modeling approach, the major assumption is that mAb domains are held fixed so that their atomistic interactions with implicit solvent can be precomputed and therefore increase simulation efficiency by a few orders of magnitude. Although domains within the mAbs are rigid, the coarse-grained model includes the flexibility of the hinge region, which is often neglected but here shown to play an important role at mAb concentrations up to 250 mg/mL. This approach is also amenable to modeling excipients, co-formulations and surface interactions and is made available in the open-source code FEASST. Simulations were validated against experimental measurements and used to predict the physical stability of mAbs. These results highlight the potential for this multiscale approach to pre-screen pharmaceutical candidate mAbs in early stage development to avoid high concentration physical instabilities that can plague later stage development.