Equipment Engineering and Operation

Abdelaziz Toumi, Jules Dingenen,joel Cenolet, Olivier Ludemann- Hombourger, Andre Kiesewetter, Martin Krahe, Michele Morelli, Henner Schmidt- Traub, Andreas Stein, and Eric Valery 

Purification experts and engineers responded with numerous improvements including 

Today half of the purification costs within pharmaceutical or biotechnological separations for instance lie in the chromatography steps, approximately 30% of the total cost, and this increases with the further concentration of the product. In other sectors, this factor is not so accentuated but still the operation costs of chromatography steps compared with other separation processes are relatively high. Chromatography costs are dependent on three major aspects  

Protein A sorbents used in antibody purification processes are typically the most expensive but have also seen the most improvement with time. To decrease costs, the lifetime of media has to be increased while keeping the adsorption characteristics. 

The lifetime of a stationary phase in small molecule purification strongly depends of course on the type of cmde material that has to be purified. In general, the current spherical phases on the market (bare silica, C8, C18, cyano, diol, amino. . . ) based on purified metal-free silica have a very good mechanical as well as a long-term chemical stability if they are used under the appropriate conditions. For example, on production scale, a cyano-modified silica stationary phase could be kept in the same column for about 4 years allowing to purify multiton quantities of product. 

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