Monoclonal antibody pharmaceuticals are the fastest-growing class of therapeutics, with a wide range of clinical applications. To assure their safety, these protein drugs must demonstrate highly consistent purity and stability. Key to these objectives is higher order structure measurements validated by calibration to reference materials. We describe preparation, characterization, and crystal structure of the Fab fragment prepared from the NIST Reference Antibody RM 8671 (NISTmAb). NISTmAb is a humanized IgG1κ antibody, produced in murine cell culture and purified by standard biopharmaceutical production methods, developed at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) to serve as a reference material. The Fab fragment was derived from NISTmAb through papain cleavage followed by protein A based purification. The purified Fab fragment was characterized by SDS-PAGE, capillary gel electrophoresis, multi-angle light scattering, size exclusion chromatography, mass spectrometry, and x-ray crystallography. The crystal structure at 0.2 nm resolution includes four independent Fab molecules with complete light chains and heavy chains through Cys 223, enabling assessment of conformational variability and providing a well-characterized reference structure for research and engineering applications. This nonproprietary, publically available reference material of known higher-order structure can support metrology in biopharmaceutical applications, and it is a suitable platform for validation of molecular modeling studies.

The reported data describe the crystallization, crystal packing, structure determination and twinning of the unliganded Fab (antigen-binding fragment) from the NISTmAb (standard reference material 8671). The raw atomic coordinates are available as Protein Data Bank structure 5K8A and biological aspects are described in the article, (Karageorgos et al., 2017) [1]. Crystal data show that the packing is unique, and show the basis for the crystal's twinned growth. Twinning is a common and often serious problem in protein structure determination by x-ray crystallography [2]. In the present case the twinning is due to a small deviation (about 0.3 nm) from 4-fold symmetry in the primary intermolecular interface. The deviation produces pseudosymmetry, generating slightly different conformations of the protein, and alternating strong and weak forms of key packing interfaces throughout the lattice.

The structure of the Fc fragment of the NIST reference antibody RM8671 is described in an orthorhombic crystal form. The molecular conformation is compared with those of precedents using a CH3-based reference frame and the pronounced asymmetry is linked to packing interactions.

Anomaly detection attempts to learn models from data that can detect anomalous examples in the data. However, naturally occurring variations in the data impact the model that is learned and thus which examples it will predict to be anomalies. Ideally, an anomaly detection method should be robust to such small changes in the data. Hence, this paper introduces a ranking stability measure that quantifies the robustness of any anomaly detector's predictions by looking at how consistently it ranks examples in terms of their anomalousness. Our experiments investigate the performance of this stability measure under different data perturbation schemes. In addition, they show how the stability measure can complement traditional anomaly detection performance measures, such as area under the ROC curve or average precision, to quantify the behaviour of different anomaly detection methods.