Yijia Guo

• A novel composite fabric-based adsorbent is presented, in the form of an elastic and robust woven fabric belt following the general designs observed in known horizontal flat belt conveyors. The adsorbent was a strong cation-exchanger functionalized by sulphopropyl (SP) made of nylon 6 reaching a static binding capacity equal to 107.3 mg/g. Moreover, excellent dynamic binding capacity (DBC) values (54.5 mg/g) was tested even when operated at high flow rates (480 cm/h). In a subsequent step, a continuous protein purification system based on the true moving bed concept, namely moving adsorption belt system, is presented. The composite adsorbent was embedded into a bench-scale prototype, permitting performance studies with a model protein (lysozyme). Results indicated that the moving belt system could recover lysozyme with a productivity up to 0.5 mg/cm2/h. Subsequently, a monoclonal antibody (Humira) was recovered from unclarified CHO_K1 cell line culture with high purity as judged by reducing SDS-PAGE, high purification factor (5.8), and in a single step confirming the suitability and selectivity of the purification procedure. A dynamic decision-support tool, was utilized to evaluate how the potential of the moving belt system various across a range of scale (50 to 5000 kg/year) from an economic perspective. The comparison of cost of goods per gram (COG/g) demonstrates that moving belt system cannot offer a better manufacturing cost comparing to protein A chromatography when the production scale was smaller than 5000 kg/year. At production scale of 5000 kg/year, both capture processes offer similar COG/g values. The most effective way to narrow the difference in COG/g is to increase the DBC of the moving belt process 4 times. Certain adoption barriers were observed during processing and the possible optimization approaches were introduced. Inherently, scale-up is relatively easy to be fulfilled if moving adsorption system is utilized for purification.