Membrane chromatography has been proposed as an alternative to packed-bed chromatography in applications where speed of separation is important. The transport of target solutes to and from the binding sites on a membrane is predominantly convective, unlike in porous resin beads, where it is diffusion-limited. Rapid separation implies higher productivity, and lower product degradation. In addition, buffer usage tends to be low. With disposable membrane devices, time-consuming and expensive operations such as cleaning and validation are also eliminated. While membrane chromatography is increasingly being adopted in the biopharmaceutical industry, its use is largely restricted to flow-through, polishing applications such as virus, endotoxin and host-cell protein removal. The main reason is that currently used membrane devices have not been designed for bind-and-elute chromatographic separations in mind. Laterally-fed membrane chromatography (LFMC) devices which are based on stacks of rectangular adsorptive membranes have been shown to be suitable for high-resolution, multi-component protein purification (1-2). These have very low dead volume and variability in flow-path lengths. Consequently, the flow-through and eluted peaks obtained using these devices are sharp, and the resolution of multi-component separation is comparable to resin-based packed-beds. Therefore, both high speed and high selectivity of separation is possible with the LFMC device. Several applications demonstrating the superior performance of the LFMC device will be presented. References R. Ghosh, Laterally-fed membrane chromatography module, US Patent Application No. 62074858 (filing date November 4, 2014). P. Madadkar, Q. Wu, R. Ghosh, A laterally-fed membrane chromatography module, Journal of Membrane Science 487 (2015) 173-179.

Efficient devices for high-resolution membrane chromatography

251st National Meeting (2016)

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