Decoding Bispecific Antibody Developability: Design Rules and Predictive Models from a 160-Member Library

Abstract

Bispecific antibodies deliver functional outcomes that monospecific antibodies cannot, yet emergent self-association, polyreactivity, and aggregation often degrade their developability relative to their parental arms. Whether bispecific developability inherits from the parents or is driven by the format has not been tested at scale. We characterized 160 bispecific antibodies and their 65 parental arms on a uniform knobs-into-holes CrossMab IgG1 scaffold across 10 assays on the PROPHET-Ab high-throughput platform. Bispecific developability separates into three classes of inheritance. Hydrophobicity and surface charge inherit cleanly from the parents (Spearman {rho} {approx} 0.85 to 0.95), so parental-level screening predicts bispecific fate. Self-association and polyreactivity inherit partially ({rho} {approx} 0.60 to 0.88), with mechanistically interpretable emergent outliers driven in part by Fv-Fv charge complementarity and a parental biophysical ceiling on the hydrophobicity (HIC) by surface-charge (HAC) plane. Thermostability is poorly predicted from parental antibodies ({rho} < 0.4), so it requires bispecific-level testing. The class framework yields actionable selection rules: triage hydrophobicity and charge at the parental level, avoid pairing two high-HIC x high-HAC arms, pair opposite-sign Fv charges to suppress self-association but re-validate at the formulation buffer, and measure thermostability on the bispecific itself. This work charts a tractable path from monospecific sequence to bispecific developability prediction. SignificanceBispecific antibodies are a fast-growing therapeutic class, yet the rational design of well-behaving bispecific antibodies from validated monospecific antibody building blocks remains challenging. A key bottleneck is the lack of comprehensive, high-quality public datasets linking parental antibody developability properties to corresponding bispecific antibody developability properties. We address this gap by releasing a dataset comprising 160 bispecific antibodies and the 65 parental monospecific antibodies profiled in 10 developability assays. The data show that bispecific antibody developability is complex. Some properties are easily predictable from the parents, whereas others emerge in the bispecific format or from the bispecific format itself. The factors that govern each property can be identified empirically and used to make practical selection decisions. The mechanistic explanations and predictive models reported here establish a compact set of actionable rules. Together, they define a framework for using computational pipelines to convert monospecific antibodies into bispecific antibodies with drug-like developability properties, enabling faster and more effective generation of high-quality bispecific antibodies for diverse therapeutic applications.