Leveraging an advanced simulated moving bed approach to achieve 3-component separation for enhanced impurity removal in a non-affinity cation exchange capture step.

One of the key challenges in downstream bioprocessing is to obtain products of high purity in a productive fashion through the effective removal of process and product related impurities. While a classical simulated moving bed (SMB) system operation can typically achieve a 2-component separation between the weakly bound impurities and target species, here we present an advanced SMB approach that can achieve a 3-component separation, including the removal of the strongly bound impurities from the target species. As a proof-of-concept, we demonstrate the enhanced removal of strongly bound host cell proteins (HCP) from the target monoclonal antibody (mAb) through the utilisation of the advanced SMB approach in a non-affinity cation exchange (CEX) capture step. In this way, 1 less polishing step was required to achieve the therapeutic requirements of < 100 ppm HCP and the overall process recovery was increased by ~ 6% compared to the corresponding process that utilised a batch CEX operation. The non-affinity CEX capture platform technology established through the utilisation of the advanced SMB approach presented here can potentially be further applied to address the downstream processing challenges presented by other challenging biotherapeutic modalities to yield a final target product with improved purity and recovery.