Internal dynamics of the NIST monoclonal antibody

Monoclonal antibodies (mAbs) bind very selectively to different antigens and mAbs are used as molecularly engineered pharmaceuticals in modern medicine. Excipients (buffers, salts or other cosolutes) are added to therapeutic mAb products to improve their stability, bioavailability and to achieve higher protein concentrations at low macroscopic viscosity. We suggest performing a QENS experiment on IRIS to study the effects of selected excipients on the molecular dynamics on the time-scale of around 100 ps of a reference mAb in solution. In our QENS experiment we would like to investigate the correlation between fast internal motions and slow collective domain motions that have been measured using high-resolution neutron spin-echo spectroscopy. For that purpose, we would like to apply for 7 days beam on IRIS.