Opportunities exist in preparative chromatography for alternative chromatography media that possess high binding capacity and throughput, but are also economically feasible for single use disposability and avoid column packing. An ion-exchange functionalised, microporous walled micro-capillary film (MMCF), has been developed as a module for cation-exchange separation of proteins. A MMCF module has been operated on a standard AKTA chromatography system at pressures up to 1.5 MPa and superficial flow velocities up to 54,000 cm h −1 . The dynamic binding capacity of the MMCF module at 10% breakthrough was 13.8 mg lysozyme/ml adsorbent volume, which is comparable to the capacity of current commercial adsorbents. Frontal analysis studies using a mixture of lysozyme and bovine serum albumin (BSA) have shown that lysozyme can be isolated free of BSA to the limit of detection of the SDS gel assay used. 98.8% of the total sample eluted was the target protein lysozyme with only 1.2% BSA impurity. MMCF may thus be a viable chromatographic medium for preparative protein chromatography.
