Characterization of Membrane Adsorbers for Contaminant Removal

Membrane adsorbers with high contaminant-removal capabilities for a large variety of impurities in a wide operational window of pH and conductivity are of great interest in biopharmaceutical production. The understanding of the interaction of contaminants and biomolecules with membrane adsorbers is a crucial aspect in the development of new membranes and purification steps in downstreaming. In order to find the most effective ligands and purification conditions as well as the understanding of the process extensive experimental process development is necessary. To reduce the effort, an appropriate, application-oriented small-scale test method (High Throughput Screening) was established and evaluated for the investigation of membrane adsorbers. This enables the parallel characterization of properties of the adsorbent in order to reduce time and material consumption in membrane and process development. New approaches using salt tolerant membrane adsorbers were investigated which allow a separation of target molecules and contaminants at similar net charge of the protein surface.