A General Platform for Antibody Purification Utilizing Engineered-micelles

Guy Patchornik, Chemical Sciences, Ariel University, Ariel, Israel (guyp@ariel.ac.il)

We introduce a new concept and a potentially general platform for antibody (Ab) purification that does not rely on chromatography nor specific ligands; rather, it makes use of detergent aggregates capable of efficiently capturing Ab's while rejecting hydrophilic impurities. Captured Ab's are then extracted from the aggregates in pure form (>95%) without co-extraction of hydrophobic impurities or aggregate dissolution. The aggregates studied consist of conjugated "Engineered-micelles" built from the nonionic detergent, Tween-20; the hydrophobic metal chelator, bathophenanthroline (batho) and Fe²⁺ ions. When tested in serum-free media with/without BSA (or HSA) as additives, human or mouse IgG’s were recovered at high overall yields (85-90%). Extraction of IgG’s with 7 different buffers at pH 3.8 sheds light on possible interactions between captured Ab's and their surrounding detergent matrix. Extracted Ab’s preserve their secondary structure, specificity and monomeric character as determined by CD, ELISA and DLS, respectively. Possible integration of the approach within industrial-scale downstream processing of therapeutic grade mAb's, will be discussed.  

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Abstract Reference & Short Personal Biography of Presenting Author

Dr. Patchornik received his B.Sc. and M.A degrees in Chemistry from Bar-Ilan University. He earned his Ph.D. in Biochemistry from the Weizmann Institute of Science and continued to a Postdoctoral position at UCLA. Upon his return to Israel, he co-founded a biotech company (Affisink Biotechnology, Israel) and served as its CTO for five years. Since 2009, Dr. Patchornik is a faculty member in the Department of Chemical Sciences at Ariel University where his research focusses on the development of alternative purification and crystallization approaches for integral membrane proteins.