Towards autonomous antibody purification

Abstract: The vision of antibody purification is to have the whole process fully automatic. It is often desirable to have a continuous process since that reduces the costs for production and the size of the used equipment. It is necessary to supply buffer solutions to the purification steps, and as part of the vision; this should be done automatically. An in-house piece of software called Orbit is used for advanced control of ÄKTA chromatography systems from GE Healthcare, that are used in antibody purification. An ÄKTA pcc system can be used for continuous processes in the first purification step, which is a capture step based on affinity chromatography. The PCC system has four columns that are used simultaneously; two are loaded continuously, one is eluted, and one is regenerated. The first part of this master thesis was to integrate the ÄKTA pcc system into the Orbit software. The second part was to design a PCC process to demonstrate that Orbit can control the PCC process. Experiments and simulations were done to verify the functionality of the PCC system in Orbit. In the future, the ÄKTA pcc system can be used together with other ÄKTA systems in an antibody purification process where all systems are controlled from Orbit. The final part of this master thesis was a proof of concept of automatic buffer production. A buffer machine that produces a buffer solution by diluting stock solutions and adjusting pH was developed. The buffer machine was designed to be able to deliver the produced buffer solution to another system, in line with the overall vision for antibody purification.