Multimodal Membrane Adsorbers for Protein Purifications at High Ionic Strength

Development of efficient bioseparation materials and processes has been highlighted as one of the most pressing challenges facing the pharmaceutical and biotechnology industries. Without intervention to improve the downstream manufacturing capacity, there will be increasing shortages of biologic products, especially for those used in high doses to treat chronic diseases. In this talk, I will describe our latest research efforts to develop adsorptive membranes for chromatographic bioseparations. Specifically, I will describe the formation, characterization, and performance of a new class of multimodal membranes that can be used for protein purifications at high ionic strength. The additional flexibility in designing purification strategies that employ these multimodal membranes makes them attractive candidates to face emerging challenges, particularly tolerance of feedstock conditions. Using this membrane platform is further appealing because volumetric productivity can be high compared to more traditional chromatography media. Our work suggests that multimodal membranes have great potential to compete with more traditional ion-exchange materials following the affinity purification step in the downstream processing of biologics.