Engineering for protein purification
As the number of therapeutic antibodies keeps increasing, efficient strategies for antibody purification are vital.
One of our key scientific achievements includes design and development of an improved protein A-based purification matrix which is highly tolerant to alkaline pH, currently a product sold by GE-Healthcare. This is a large benefit in industrial purification of IgG since alkaline conditions normally is used to sanitize the equipment between different batches.
Recently we have also developed a Protein A-based IgG binding protein domain with calcium dependent behavior, ZCa. Here the purpose is to make it possible to circumvent the acidic elution conditions currently needed for elution from the protein A-columns, since the low pH can be deleterious for the antibodies. Multimeric versions of this domain have shown that the domain has large potential to be of use in antibody purification.
