Improving selectivity and performing online on-column fractioning in liquid chromatography for the separation of therapeutic biopharmaceutical products

Abstract A novel column-coupling approach is suggested to improve both the selectivity and efficiency of protein separations in liquid chromatography. Protein separations often suffer from limited selectivity or not appropriate resolving power. For a new biopharmaceutical product, the identification of the main and minor variant species is required. For that purpose, often offline collection fractioning is applied which is time consuming and regularly dilute the samples to an unacceptable extent. By serially coupling columns in the order of their increasing retentivity and applying “multi-isocratic” elution mode, indeed any (arbitrary) selectivity can be attained. Moreover, if a protein peak is trapped at the inlet of a later column segment – of a coupled system -, its band will be refocused and elute in unprecedented sharp peak. Furthermore, it becomes possible to perform online on-column fractioning of protein species within a very short analysis time (∼ 1 min) and without sample dilution. Two-, three- or multiple column systems can be developed and applied for complex sample separations (such as antibody mixtures). This new methodology can be particularly useful to improve the analysis (and therefore, safety and quality) of therapeutic mAbs and related products and offers benefits compared to offline fractionating. It is also demonstrated in this proof of concept study, that methyl (C1) modified RP phase has a great potential for protein separations despite it is not commercially available in state-of-the-art wide pore superficially porous particle format..