Author Archives: Jeff Op de Beeck

Nontargeted HCP Monitoring in Downstream Process Samples: Combining Micro Pillar Array Columns with Mass Spectrometry

Protein biopharmaceuticals have emerged as important treatments for diseases with otherwise unmet medical needs. These biologics are produced by recombinant mammalian, yeast, or bacterial expression systems. Along with therapeutic proteins, those cells produce endogenous host-cell proteins (HCPs) that can contaminate biopharmaceutical products despite multiple purification steps in downstream processing. Because such process-related impurities can affect product safety and efficacy, they need to be monitored closely. Multicomponent enzyme-lined immunosorbent assays (ELISAs) presently are the workhorse method for HCP testing, with high…

µPAC™ Microchip Chromatography: Better By Design

The boundaries of technology can be pushed significantly when insights from different fields reinforce each other. Based on in silico simulations demonstrating the importance of order on the efficiency of chromatographic separations, PharmaFluidics has combined expertise from the analytical chromatography and semiconductor chip manufacturing industries to create a new type of nanoscale liquid chromatography (LC) column. Conventional LC columns contain randomly packed beads as a stationary phase. By contrast, PharmaFluidics uses a lithographic etching process to create a perfectly ordered…