Continuous chromatography and single-use filtration at BPI Europe

This year’s Bioprocessing International (BPI) European Summit took place in Amsterdam, The Netherlands, last week, and amid the hubbub of cell line innovations and fancy fermenters stood the latest in downstream bioprocessing tech.

Pall Life Science boasted about its Cadence Acoustic Separator which can be used to clarify fed-batches of CHO cell cultures, which senior separation technology specialist Marco Koppe said can also be used for continuous bioprocessing which he said is “becoming more and more important”​ within the industry.

The tech is available for lab-scale bioproduction but a large-scale GMP version will be available later this year.

Similarly, German tech firm LEWA was displaying its chromatography system for the continued purification of monoclonal antibodies. Working with partner ChromaCon, the Contichrom CUBE Combined system system has a twin-column configuration for continuous purification within a GMP system.

“The system you see here has a maximum flow rate of 600ml/minute and with a 10cm Protein A column – two of them of course – you can actually produce up to 1.5kg of monoclonal antibodies per day,”​ sales director for Europe and Asia Flemming Carlsen told us

“This is fitting for quite a lot of the expected new perfusion systems that will deliver the high titre of mAb in pilot and maybe production scale.”​

Meanwhile GE Healthcare showcased its AKTA Readyflux system, the filtration companion to its AKTA chromatography system. The tech is a single-use system designed for either a hollow-fibre or cassette format.