'One-pot' manufacturing process yielding low-cost magnetic supports for bioprocessing

One of the major drawbacks to the large scale application of magnetic support based separations in biotechnology is the astronomic price of large quantities of commercially available magnetic support materials. The aim of this work has been to develop a simple, fast and scalable ‘one-pot’ manufacturing route to cheap magnetic adsorbents to be used in High-Gradient Magnetic Fishing, Magnetically Enhanced Press Filtration and Magnetically Enhanced Centrifugation systems. An inverse liquid-liquid two phase polymerization technique employing low cost chemicals combined with the use of a rotor stator type high shear mixer was systematically investigated. When the ‘ideal’ manufacturing conditions were identified, nonporous superparamagnetic composite supports (3 .m average size; M\(_s\): 34 A m\(^2\) kg\(^{-1}\); magnetic content: 44.3%) were successfully created. Following further optimization, the ‘one-pot’ manufacturing procedure was used to produce anion exchange magnetic adsorbents, and their binding capacity was determined using human serum albumin as a model species (Q\(_{max}\)=46.1 mg of protein per gram of adsorbent; K\(_d\)=2.52 .M). Further attempts to create cation exchange magnetic supports were unsuccessful mainly due to chemical incompatibility issues between the reaction chemicals and the ferrofluid used.