438a A Novel Cascade Membrane Bioreactor Configuration for Continuous Production of F(Ab')2 from Igg by Pepsin Digestion

Kaustubha Mohanty, Dharmesh Kanani, and Raja Ghosh. Chemical Engineering, McMaster University, 1280, Main Street West, Hamilton, ON L8S 4L7, Canada

Antibodies and their fragments are widely used as medical and clinical diagnostics, as therapeutics, and in biosensors and affinity purification processes. Of particular interest is the application of polyclonal antibodies as antivenoms. Currently, the safest antivenoms are known to be in Fab or F(ab')2 formats. Antibody fragments can be obtained by cleaving the antibody molecule using proteolytic enzymes such as pepsin, papain and trypsin. Recently, pepsin has been shown suitable for the digestion of IgG to form F(ab')2 by eliminating the Fc portion, which is responsible for the side-effects when administered with antitoxins in whole IgG format. F(ab')2 production is basically done in batch process. The international growing demand of F(ab')2 has lead to search for a continuous process for its production from IgG by pepsin digestion. This work discusses a novel two-stage cascade membrane bioreactor configuration for the continuous production of F(ab')2. Two stirred cell membrane bioreactors of 10 kDa and 100 kDa are used for this purpose. Different parameters that effect the production and purity of F(ab')2 are the feed concentration, the flowrates of feed and sweep and the rate of recirculation of retentate from reactor 1 to reactor 2. It has been found that the amount of pepsin used in this process is significantly lower than that used in batch processes. SDS-PAGE, carried out under nonreducing conditions was used to analyse the pepsin digested samples. The result of this study is encouraging and will contribute towards developing a simple, continuous process for the production of antivenoms that might be implemented locally in regions of developing countries suffering from high death occurrences caused by envenomations.