Development and Characterization of Affinity Membranes for Immunoglobulin Purification

The purification of antibodies is conventionally performed using affinity chromatography columns, with Protein A as ligand. The development of valid alternatives to Protein A is one of the challenges of the research in downstream processing, which becomes more important as the production capability of the biopharmaceutical industry increases. The objective of this work is the characterization of affinity membranes derivatized with two different synthetic ligands that show high specificity for immunoglobulins. The affinity membranes have been prepared and characterized, in view of their application in the capture purification step.