INTEGRATED PLATFORMS FOR THE CLARIFICATION AND CAPTURE OF MONOCLONAL ANTIBODIES

 

S.C. Bernardo, A.M. Azevedo and M.R Aires-Barros

 

 

Antibodies play an important role in both medicine and analytical biotechnology. Recently, the demand for monoclonal antibodies (mAbs) has been increasing exponentially, since their potential for therapeutic use was disclosed and improved techniques to produce them at higher titers have become available. Although upstream processing of mAbs has suffered a tremendous improvement, in the last decades, the downstream processing has been considered the bottleneck in providing antibodies at reliable costs, being, in fact, the major cost factor with 50 to 80\% of total production costs. Therefore, alternative methods for mAbs's purification may be required. Aqueous two-phase systems (ATPS) have been described, for the last decade, as a viable alternative to the current establish platform, since clarification, concentration and purification can be achieved in just one step using a biocompatible environment. Therefore, the use of ATPS for integrative purification of mAbs it will be reviewed.