Dynamics and dose response in scaffold ligand binding

Abstract

This paper considers systems in which two or more ligands bind independently to a common scaffold. Such systems arise in a range of applications, including immunotherapy and synthetic biology. We show that each stoichiometric compatibility class contains a unique steady state, and that this steady state is asymptotically stable. The main result gives a rigorous proof that the steady-state concentration of the fully bound complex, viewed as a function of the total scaffold concentration, has a unique maximum. This biphasic dose response is a characteristic feature of scaffolding systems and, in the special case of two ligands, plays an important role in the design and analysis of bispecific antibody drugs.

Added much more motivation, and changed title and abstract to reflect that the general case (not just the case m=3) is now treated (with basically the same treatment)