GE: new standard for monoclonal antibody purification

GE Healthcare has introduced a new protein A chromatography resin, MabSelect PrismA, which it says will help biopharmaceutical manufacturers improve monoclonal antibody purification capacity by up to 40 percent.

Monoclonal antibodies are the largest and fastest growing segment of biologics, with the market estimated to reach $125 billion in 2020. Nearly all antibody drugs on the market use protein A resin as the first purification step when extracting the target protein from the cell culture to make the final biopharmaceutical product.

The efficiency with which cells produce antibodies during biomanufacturing has improved radically during the past years, creating pressure on purification technologies. The result has been increased processing time and increased consumption of resins.

MabSelect PrismA has superior binding capacity, reducing the amount of resin needed to purify a certain amount of protein.

“Biopharma companies are constantly looking for more ways to increase their output, and protein A has a critical role to support these efforts. The thorough research and development work that we have carried out to create MabSelect PrismA sets a new standard for monoclonal antibody purification,” said Jan Makela, General Manager, BioProcess, GE Healthcare Life Sciences.

“With this chromatography resin our customers will be able to produce more biopharmaceuticals out of their existing manufacturing equipment. Protein purification is no longer a bottleneck, but driving higher productivity and shorter manufacturing lead times for our customers,” Makela said.

MabSelect PrismA was developed at the GE Healthcare Life Sciences site in Uppsala, Sweden, where the resin is also manufactured. The factory in Uppsala is one of the largest manufacturing facilities for chromatography resins in the world. From 2017 and 2022 GE is annually investing up to $70 million in the facility to significantly increase its capacity.