Scientists at acib develop world's first continuous purification method for valuable drugs. This will lead to significantly reduced production costs and to cheaper pharmaceuticals that are affordable for non-privileged health care systems.

VIENNA, AUSTRIA, March 26, 2015 /24-7PressRelease/ -- Imagine a loved relative suffering from cancer - and you could not afford a treatment because the drugs are too expensive. The Austrian Centre of Industrial Biotechnology (acib) developed a method with the power to reduce production costs of highly valued drugs significantly.

Without antibodies we would be at the mercy of pathogens or cancer cells. Therapeutic antibodies are used as passive vaccines, for cancer treatment or for controlling autoimmune diseases such as multiple sclerosis. According to "bccresearch.com" the global market for antibody drugs was worth 70 billion USD in 2014 and should rise to 122 billion USD until 2019.

Two thirds of those molecules are produced biotechnologically using Chinese hamster ovary cells (CHO). Actually the major cost factor for industry is purification using "protein A" affinity chromatography where tens of thousands of liters of culture volume have to be processed annually. About 80 % of the production costs fall upon purification.

Here the new purification method comes into play. Researchers from the acib and the University of Life Sciences Vienna developed the first downstream processing method for recombinant antibodies from clarified CHO cultures. A feasibility study exemplified by the purification of immune globulin G (IgG) shows that the method can compete with "protein A" affinity chromatography in terms of yield and outperforms chromatography according to the speed of operation. A further advantage is the transferability of the operation parameters from the actually used batch to the continuous approach. "Our method shows great potential as a new platform technology for the pharmaceutical industry", says Prof. Alois Jungbauer, who is in negotiations with several international companies about building pilot plants.

The purification method was published in the Biotechnology Journal: http://goo.gl/KYvWLD

A comment emphasizes the relevance of the project: http://goo.gl/q89aAt

acib is an international research center, think tank and network of 120+ international universities and industry partners. Using the concepts of nature, 200+ acib-scientists with up to 30+ years of experience in biotechnology replace traditional industrial methods with new, more economic and ecological technologies.
www.acib.at

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