Integrated process development—a robust, rapid method for inclusion body harvesting and processing at the microscale level

ABSTRACT

Escherichia coli stores large amounts of highly pure product within inclusion bodies (IBs). To take advantage of this beneficial feature, after cell disintegration, the first step to optimal product recovery is efficient IB preparation. This step is also important in evaluating upstream optimization and process development, due to the potential impact of bioprocessing conditions on product quality and on the nanoscale properties of IBs. Proper IB preparation is often neglected, due to laboratory-scale methods requiring large amounts of materials and labor. Miniaturization and parallelization can accelerate analyses of individual processing steps and provide a deeper understanding of up- and downstream processing interdependencies. Consequently, reproducible, predictive microscale methods are in demand. In the present study, we complemented a recently established high-throughput cell disruption method with a microscale method for preparing purified IBs. This preparation provided results comparable to laboratory-scale IB processing, regarding impurity depletion, and product loss. Furthermore, with this method, we performed a “design of experiments” study to demonstrate the influence of fermentation conditions on the performance of subsequent downstream steps and product quality. We showed that this approach provided a 300-fold reduction in material consumption for each fermentation condition and a 24-fold reduction in processing time for 24 samples.

KEYWORDS:

• Cell disruption
• E. coli
• high-throughput
• miniaturization
• protein refolding
• scale-up

Acknowledgment

The authors would wish to thank Heidrun Exl for her support with the analytics.

Additional information

Funding

Biopharma Process Science Austria, at Boehringer-Ingelheim RCV, provided the facility, materials, and financial support for this work.