Industries using bioseparations

In this section, the wide range of industries using bioseparation techniques are briefly reviewed. 

In the industries using bioseparations described above, there is a great variation in terms of production scale and product quality between waste water treatment and pharmaceutical production. This will obviously affect the choice of equipment for the process, although in many cases the principle on which bioseparation is based will be common. For example, centrifuga-... 

Bioseparation processes make use of many separation techniques commonly used in the chemical process industries. However, bioseparations have distinct characteristics that are not common in the traditional separations of chemical processes. Some of the unique characteristics of bioseparation products can be listed as follows ... 

Affinity adsorption offers high selectivity in many bioseparations. However, the high cost of the resin is a major disadvantage and limits its industrial use. 

Bioseparations frequently entail separations of proteins and related materials from biological matrices.1 This book is planned to serve as a handbook of bioseparations, where the primary focus is separations of proteins however, separations of other materials of interest such as nucleic acids and oligonucleotides are also covered to assist the reader in tackling their particular bioseparation problems. Included in this text is a chapter on the separation of monoclonal antibodies, as these materials have found numerous uses in the biopharmaceutical industry. As a matter of fact, in the last few decades, monoclonal antibodies and recombinant antibodies have become one of the largest classes of proteins that have received FDA approval as therapeutics and diagnostics. 

In moving from laboratory- or pilot-scale processing to full-scale manufacturing, it can be difficult to scale up certain types of bioseparation equipment easily for example, high g centrifuges are available as bench-mounted units (using test tubes), but an equivalent industrial machine with a similar g force is unlikely to be a cost-effective solution, even if it were possible to build a suitable unit. It would not be realistic to consider 10 or 100 identical units as a realistic alternative. Compromises are therefore required as a process is commercialized, to ensure that the process remains technically and economically feasible. 

The competitive nature of the food and beverage industry and the need for continued improvements in cost-effective manufacturing have provided an impetus for companies to develop and use new bioseparation techniques at very large scales, for example, freeze-drying in coffee production and continuous centrifugation in brewing. 

Cross-flow filtration is also referred to as tangential flow filtration or microfiltration, but all three terms refer to a process by which membranes are used to separate components in a liquid solution (or suspension) on the basis of their size. The development of robust membranes in polymeric and ceramic materials has provided a powerful new technology for bioseparations, which is already widespread in the process industries as well as for water treatment processes. 

Cell disruption techniques are used to recover materials produced within the cell, for example, industrial enzymes and some pharmaceutical proteins. Generally this stage of bioseparation will follow cell recovery, for example, by centrifugation, and precede the isolation of the desired product from the cell debris which is also produced during the disruption process. 

The bioseparation technique which is probably the most readily adapted to modern process control techniques is extraction. Liquid-liquid extraction is a mature unit process with application in industrial-scale protein separation.30 Control techniques used on similar systems in other industrial applications should be readily adaptable to bioprocessing, the primary difficulty being the lack of data on the partitioning and related behavior of the product. 

This section describes some general processes used for protein purification, including methods and tools currently employed by the bioseparation industry to achieve clarification, capture, and removal of impurities. 

Research activity on drug delivery using mesoporous materials currently far exceeds that on nutrient delivery (Bernardos and Kourimska 2013). The widespread use of mesoporous silica as adsorbents for separating functional food ingredients has also been hindered by insufficient chemical stability under t5qDical food processing conditions (Brady et al. 2007). In the food industry, bioseparation media are typically cleaned and regenerated with sodium hydroxide solutions at 80 °C. This specific application area does not look compatible with mesoporous silicon. 

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