(122d) Purification of Monoclonal Antibody from Transgenic Tobacco Leaves Using Membrane Chromatography

Monoclonal antibodies (mAbs) are very important class of biopharmaceuticals. MAbs produced by CHO cell culture have the potential risk of being contaminated by animal viruses and other pathogens and such cell culture is also hard to scale up. Molecular farming with transgenic tobacco can solve these problems. However, the expression level of mAb in transgenic tobacco is very low and tobacco leaves have chemicals such as alkaloids, pigments, polyphenols and lots of plant proteins. Therefore techniques used for purifying mAbs from CHO cell culture, mainly column based chromatography might not be suitable for purifying plant based mAbs, particularly from a scale-up point of view. Membrane chromatography is a new membrane-based purification method with high throughput and high resolution. Its effective use for purifying cell culture based mAbs has already been demonstrated (Ghosh et al., 2006). The current work deals with the purification of mAb from transgenic tobacco leaves using a membrane chromatography based bioprocess, ion exchange membrane chromatography (IEMC) followed by hydrophobic interaction membrane chromatography (HIMC). GHOSH, R., & WANG, L. (2006) Purification of humanized monoclonal antibody by hydrophobic interaction membrane chromatography. Journal of Chromatography A, 1107, 104-109.