The collaboration will see Wales, UK-based bioprocessing resin maker Purolite develop and commercialise a Protein A resin bead to be used with ChromaTan Corporation’s Continuous Countercurrent Tangential Chromatography (CCTC) technology – a continuous and column-free purification system.
“The resin beads are loaded into the CCTC flow path as a slurry and remain in the slurry form,” the two companies told Biopharma-Reporter. “It’s helpful to visualize the function of the resin slurry as a rapidly cycled conveyor belt that is constantly being ‘worked on’ by the appropriate buffers.”
They added the resin can also be un-loaded, cleaned and re-used for a different batch with a different flow path if necessary.
According to the firms, the combination with Purolite’s resin, which will be sold separately from the flow path and CCTC hardware, can increase productivity for Protein A capture, intermediate and polishing steps by up to 15 times, compared to conventional batch affinity chromatography.
“Purolite and ChromaTan’s partnerships enabled a new type of resin product that maximises CCTC system benefits. The CCTC system is no longer constrained by column geometry and does not carry restrictions that columns impose on particle size and softness of the bead because of flow and pressure limitations.
“As a result we were able to design a resin that is completely outside of column chromatography operating space to increase kinetics, mass transfer and binding capacity by over 50%.”
Continuous chromatography
The partnership is the latest news in the continuous chromatography space, an area which has been cited as “the next logical step” in bioprocessing after single-use adoption.
“Patients are demanding more access and affordability to these much needed therapeutic treatments which are still expensive today. As such future processes need to evolve and forward thinking technology providers like Purolite and Chromatan are continuing to innovate accordingly,” Chromaton and Purolite said.
“Nothing changes without fresh innovation. And partnerships such as [ours] provide unique opportunities for innovation that would not occur otherwise.”