This article is based on a real industrial purification process by Fareva and highlights the power of mechanistic modeling for process development:
Our client needed to change a raw material to secure his supply chain. From a process point of view, it was supposed to be seamless. However, a simple change of counter-ion made the separation completely inefficient and the separation process had to be redesigned completely.
When developing purification processes, ion-exchange chromatography is often approximated by classical adsorption models. However, in many cases, this inaccuracy fails to represent the system adequately, and finding a robust operating point proves very difficult – if not impossible!
In this example, two isomers of an antibiotic produced by fermentation were to be separated by ion-exchange chromatography.
A rational approach to ion-exchange and simulations using Ypso-Ionic® unlocked the process.
In particular, the study highlighted that the two isomers had very similar behaviors except in a narrow pH window around 9 where they bore different charges. The whole purification relied on this slight difference and only a rigorous ion-exchange model could represent the phenomena.
Read more about this study here: Using mechanistic modeling for understanding antibiotics purification with ion-exchange chromatography