Virus removal by filtration is a crucial step in ensuring the safety of therapeutic antibodies and other biopharmaceutical products by mitigating the risk of endogenous and adventitious viral contamination. However, there are monoclonal antibodies (mAb) that are difficult to filter effectively using virus removal filters (i.e., challenging mAbs), necessitating the creation of guidelines for designing suitable filtration conditions for these challenging molecules. This study presents a filtration design space for filtration conditions using a new regenerated cellulose membrane filter with a representative challenging mAb. The filter demonstrated that filtration throughput is adaptable across a wide range of conditions for low to medium mAb concentrations, indicating its suitability for introduction into platform processes for related biopharmaceutical products.
Keywords: design of experiments (DoE); design space; immunoglobulins; nanofiltration; virus retentive filtration.
© 2025 The Author(s). Biotechnology Progress published by Wiley Periodicals LLC on behalf of American Institute of Chemical Engineers.