New Structured Substrates for Downstream Processing of Complex Biopharmaceuticals - NESSIE

Project summary

Virus-like particles (VLPs) and viral vectors (VVs) are revolutionizing medicine by offering targeted vaccines. Production of VLPs and VVs is costly and time consuming because purification by chromatography, the state-of-the-art technique, has drawbacks that limit its performance. We will develop novel targeted surface-modified chromatographic materials for purification of these complex biopharmaceuticals. Structured monoliths will be produced by post-modification of shapes produced by additive manufacturing (AM). We will use ceramic-based AM techniques with ~150 m resolution to produce mechanically stable isoreticular monoliths for downstream processing of clarified bioreaction bulks of adenoviruses and retro-VLPs as model cases. With new materials and using AM techniques applied also to design the flow distributors, we aim to precisely control the purification unit. We will also design novel continuous chromatographic methods to reduce time lags and thus production cost.