Adsorbents for Expanded Bed Adsorption: Preparation and Functionalization

Continuous Manufacturing of Recombinant Therapeutic Proteins: Upstream and Downstream Technologies

Continuous biomanufacturing of recombinant therapeutic proteins offers several potential advantages over conventional batch processing, including reduced cost of goods, more flexible and responsive manufacturing facilities, and improved and consistent product quality. Although continuous approaches to various upstream and downstream unit operations have been considered and studied for decades, in recent years interest and application have accelerated. Researchers have achieved increasingly higher levels of process intensification, and have also begun to integrate different continuous unit operations into larger, holistically continuous processes. This review first discusses approaches for continuous cell culture, with a focus on perfusion-enabling cell separation technologies including gravitational, centrifugal, and acoustic settling, as well as filtration-based techniques. We follow with a review of various continuous downstream unit operations, covering categories such as clarification, chromatography, formulation, and viral inactivation and filtration. The review ends by summarizing case studies of integrated and continuous processing as reported in the literature.

The Process of Separating Bovine Serum Albumin Using Hydroxyapatite and Active Babassu Coal (Orbignya martiana)

Bovine serum albumin is one of the major serum proteins; it plays an important role as a result of its functional and nutritional properties which have bioactive peptides. Adsorption method was used to separate protein, which involves hydroxyapatite, synthetic hydroxyapatite, and active babassu coal. Initially, characterization was carried out using the zeta potential of the adsorbents. Kinetic pseudo-first- and pseudo-second-order models were applied. For isotherms, equilibrium data studies were carried out using the Langmuir and Freundlich models, in addition to determining the efficiency of adsorptive process. The results of the zeta potential showed loads ranging from +6.9 to -42.8 mV. The kinetic data were better represented in the pseudo-second-order model with chemisorption characteristics. The adsorption capacity of the adsorbents decreased as pH increased, indicating that the electrostatic bonds and some functional groups of active babassu coal contributed to the reduction of adsorption, especially oxygen linked to carbon atoms. The value of pH 4.0 showed the best results of adsorption, being obtained as the maximum adsorption capacity (q m ) and yield (%) (where q m = 87.95 mg g(-1) and 74.2%; 68.26 mg g(-1) and 68.6%; and 36.18 mg g(-1), 37.4%) of hydroxyapatite, synthetic hydroxyapatite, and active babassu coal, respectively.

Evaluation and characterization of axial distribution in expanded bed. I. Bead size, bead density and local bed voidage

Expanded bed adsorption (EBA) is an innovative chromatography technology that allows the adsorption of target proteins directly from unclarified feedstock, and the most important property of an expanded bed is the perfectly classified fluidization of resin beads in the column. Due to the variation of both size and density of bulk resin beads, the axial distributions of bead size, bead density and bed voidage are the inherent characteristics of an expanded bed. However, the understanding on these properties is quite limited. In this study, raw beads (3% crosslinked agarose containing tungsten carbide) and 2cm-diameter nozzle column were used as the model system and mean bead size, bead density and local bed voidage along the bed height were measured systematically with the in-bed sampling method for two settled bed heights (11.5 and 23.1cm) and different expansion factors (1.4-2.6). With the increase of bed height, mean bead size and wet density of the beads decreased from 140 to 90μm and from 4 to 2g/ml, respectively. The local bed voidage increased from 0.6 to 0.9 with the increasing bed height. The relative bed height and relative bed voidage were introduced to describe the general rule of axial distribution. Some empirical equations were used to correlate the mean bead size, bead density and local bed voidage along the bed height with the standard deviations of 10.6%, 6.1% and 5.5, respectively. In addition, a general equation was proposed to predict the axial distributions of bead size, bead density and local bed voidage in the column with standard deviations less than 10% for most of the experimental data, which would be useful for the characterization of resin beads distribution in an expanded bed under varying operation conditions.

Production, recovery and purification of a recombinant β-galactosidase by expanded bed anion exchange adsorption

β-Galactosidase is a hydrolase enzyme that catalyzes the hydrolysis of β-galactosides into monosaccharides; its major application in the food industry is to reduce the content of lactose in lactic products. The aim of this work is to recover this enzyme from a cell lysate by adsorption onto Streamline-DEAE in an expanded bed, avoiding, as much as possible, biomass deposition onto the adsorbent matrix. So as to achieve less cell debris-matrix interaction, the adsorbent surface was covered with polyvinyl pyrrolidone. The enzyme showed to bind in the same extent to naked and covered Streamline-DEAE (65 mg β-gal/g matrix) in batch mode in the absence of any biomass. The kinetics of the adsorption process was studied and no effect of the polyvinyl pyrrolidone covering was found. The optimal conditions for the recovery were achieved by using a lysate made of 40% wet weight of cells, a polyvinyl pyrrolidone-covered matrix/lysate ratio of 10% and carrying out the adsorption process in expanded bed with recirculation over 2h in 20 mM phosphate buffer pH 7.4. The fraction recovered after the elution contained 65% of the initial amount of enzyme with a 12.6-fold increased specific activity with respect to the lysate. The polyvinyl pyrrolidone content in the eluate was determined and found negligible. The remarkable point of this work is that it was possible to partially purify the enzyme using a feedstock containing an unusually high biomass concentration in the presence of polyvinyl pyrrolidone onto weak anion exchangers.