28.6.2008

MSS2008 Award Recipients

Monolith Summer Symposium 2008

May, Portoroz, Slovenia - The 3rd Monolith Summer Symposium (MSS2008) with 120 participants from 25 countries was held in Portoroz, Slovenia and led by many of the world's leading authorities on monolith technology. This innovative biochromatographic technique is truly capable of eliminating the bottlenecks in downstream processing.

Some of the extraordinary capabilities of monolithic chromatography resins presented at the MSS,  IgM dynamic binding capacity of over 40mg/mL of CIM monolith was demonstrated in Pete Gagnon’s (Validated Biosystems) lecture which clearly highlighted monoliths industrial capabilities. Monolith's ability to »de-bottleneck« downstream processing was also acknowledged by Uwe Gottschalk (Sartorius) in his presentation on the future challenges in monoclonal antibody purification.

The speed of monoliths was presented by Yow-Pin Lim (ProThera Biologics) showing a CIM monolith-based purification of Inter-alpha Trypsin Inhibitor (soon to enter clinical trials). This molecule is highly effective for the treatment of sepsis and anthrax. The monolith was his method of choice because he quickly developed a highly efficienct purification process that achieves 90% purity and 75% recovery from plasma in a single step. The benefit being that he was able to evaluate a wider range of conditions than is typical for such early phase process development using traditional phases finding the optimal conditions for this potentially lifesaving therapy.

Mark Etzel (University of Wisconsin) presented experimental data directed toward elucidating models of virus retention on convective supports. He presented the ability of experimental salt-tolerant anion exchange CIM monoliths to improve viral clearance. One such monolith was able to achieve phage clearance of 6.1 LRV (logs of virus removal) in a buffer lacking sodium chloride, and still achieved 5.5 and 3.5 LRV at 50 and 150 mM sodium chloride. These results have important ramifications for the removal of non-enveloped retrovirus from therapeutic antibodies and other recombinant proteins, and also offer new tools for the purification of viral vectors and vaccines.

At the opening ceremony, Pete Gagnon from Validated Biosystems received the CIM Award for outstanding personal contributions to the acceptance of the monolith technology in the biopharmaceutical industry.

This year’s MSS Young Researchers Corner Best Presentation Award was given to Vida Frankovic (BIA Separations), for her presentation on Characterization of grafted weak anion exchange methacrylate monoliths.

For this year's Best Poster Award the Scientific Commitee awarded the following outstanding posterpresentations:

- 1st prize – Francesca Mancini for poster on Development of beta-secretase monolithic micro immobilized enzyme reactor: characterization, activity and inhibition studies
- 2nd prize – Marina Slabospitskaya for poster on on Novel functional methacrylate monoliths with reactive cyano-groups)
- 3rd prize – Jelena Ivančić - Jelečki for poster on Quantification of contaminating cellular DNA in plasma samples by chromatography on short monolithic columns and real-time PCR.

BIA Separations sponsored both awards.

Posters presented by BIA Separations

Visit the MSS website and download the MSS2008 Abstract Book here

Back