Ion exchange has been extensively used for many purposes in the medical and pharmaceutical industries over the years. This webinar will present an industrial case study, namely the purification of an amino-glycoside antibiotic produced by fermentation. The mixture to be purified contains two isomers, which must be separated. A scientific development program has been undertaken in order to optimize certain characteristics of the process like productivity, yield or eluent consumption. A set of well targeted experiments revealed some unexpected behaviors like an exchange capacity towards the desired isomer significantly lower than the ion exchange capacity of the resin, or the strong influence of the presence of a counterion on the separation of the isomers. An advanced ion-exchange modeling and simulation work enabled to understand the reason of these unexpected behaviors and paved the way for an efficient process design. Overall, this study illustrates the strength of using rigorous ion-exchange models – as opposed to the often used classical adsorption models – to describe ion-exchange chromatography.
Presented at Purolite's Advanced Chromatography Workshop 2021