Poondi Rajash Gavara

• The high demand for the production of biopharmaceuticals is limited by the total available manufacturing capacity, process efficiency and cost in a biotechnology industry mainly due to bottlenecks in the downstream processing (DSP) of the products. Downstream purification by traditional packed bed chromatography adsorbents plays a central role which exhibit major limitations, as a consequence the biopharmaceutical industry requires alternative materials and systems to replace. This PhD thesis is aimed at developing adsorption systems based on novel ion-exchange fibrous adsorbents for efficient and cost effective solutions to industrial downstream processing of bioproducts. In this work, strong cation exchange composite fibrous adsorbents have been developed and characterized. The mentioned system showed high capacity and high throughput for chromatography performance that can be used in intermediate purification and also exhibited superior performance during early protein capture application utilizing a model protein from an artificial crude feed stock. Similarly, strong anion-exchange fibrous adsorbents have been developed and characterized as high capacity chromatography support and investigated for their mass transfer properties. The fibrous geometry system demonstrated the potential for use in column scalable operations with high binding capacity and high throughput. A scaling prototype chromatography cartridge system based on the functionalized fibrous adsorbents has been evaluated and demonstrated superior hydrodynamics and process performances compared to commercial columns for industrial downstream processing. Finally, in this research work, the real application of fibrous base adsorbents has been successfully demonstrated as chromatographic support as an alternative to commercial beads in a single step capture and large-scale purification of an algal product, beta-Phycoerythrin, from unicellular marine algae using the mentioned system.