Revival of Expanded Bed Adsorption Technology

The output of cell cultures for biopharmaceutical products has been improved by mainly advances in molecular biology to increase the cell line productivity, optimization of media compositions, and feed delivery strategies. DSM has developed XD® Technology to drive yield improvements in the production of biopharmaceuticals. This process is able to push the cell density within the bioreactor to the max and thereby achieve maximum productivity. A 5-10 fold increase can be obtained, resulting in for example 12 g/L for standard IgG based on CHO or 27 g/L for standard IgG based on PER.C6® cell line. In the recent years, also improved and new separation technologies are developed which are essential to overcome the bottlenecks in downstream processing and to lower the costs which are currently for a major part in DSP. The development of disposable technologies in these concepts is very important as these will reduce the investment and cleaning costs. Expanded Bed Adsorption technology is now also available in disposable form. With Expanded Bed Adsorption Technology biomass removal and capture is combined in one process step leading to less processing time, reduction of process steps, and lower cost of operation. Increased density –with tungsten carbide- adsorbent media are fluidized in a column bed and products are captured on the protein-A, ion-exchange or mixed mode ligands. In this presentation the XD® and EBA concept will be presented and the recents improvements of EBA will be shown.