Facing the challenges in bio-pharmaceutical production: developments in ion exchange media to bring down cost of goods.

As the bio-pharmaceutical industry matures, terms like “cost of goods” are becoming more and more important. Up to now, strain optimisation for high productivity and upstream purification were the bottleneck for most bio-processes. However, with the progress made in recent years, titers in fermentation processes have increased significantly. Obviously, this increased volumetric productivity will help reducing the cost of goods, but it also has an impact on the downstream processing. Therefore, improved downstream processing media are required to process the increased product load in the same timeframe. Recently, new materials, based on fully synthetic polymer based matrices became available and show important advantages over traditional polysaccharide-derived media. In the following article the focus is on ion exchange chromatography (IEX) as an
important step in the biopharmaceutical process.