Vydac Tech Poster - Reversed Phase Scale-up

By Reno Nguyen, Jochen Saar, Kim Vind, and Bart Denoulet

RP-HPLC is the preferred method for analyzing and purifying peptides and proteins. Pharmaceutical and biotech industries are working to optimize analytical separations of interest including polypeptides. Once results are optimized, it will be necessary to scale up this separation to a larger scale either in pilot or production scale. In contrast to analytical separations that ask for the best possible resolution of all compounds in crude mixtures, the main goal of this scaling up to process scale is to obtain high levels of purity of only the compound of interest combined with its high recovery or yield.

The key factors to the success of this process will be the packing medium and the equipment used. Media need to be of high quality (can be either irregular or spherical) so unwanted interactions with the compounds are avoided. Loading capacity, throughput, and price are important commercial parameters to consider.

The columns and equipment need to comply with pharma and biotech standards as well as with the local engineering and safety regulations and need to be flexible to meet all requirements for the specific purification needs.