Bridging Methods
Integrating traditional and modern methods is a useful way to process albumin.
There are three main steps that combine Cohn fractionation with chromatography: 1) factors I, II, and III are removed via cold ethanol fractionation, 2) Sepharose fast flow ion exchange and sepharose fast flow chromatography procedures are run, and 3) gel filtration is run. The result is albumin with 9% lower aluminum levels with a processing time that is almost twice as fast.
Although it was hard to make chromatographic processing methods widely adopted, global expansion is a work in progress. Various blood components must be readily available at various medical treatment centers around the world. The Institute of Transfusion Medicine in Skopje, Macedonia is a plasma fractionation center in the Balkans. Their modernized albumin purification process consists of five steps: 1) starting material is plasma that has been pretreated by centrifugation, 2) a round of gel filtration is run, 3) ion exchange on DEAE Sepharose is run to bind the albumin to the column, 4) albumin is eluted with a sodium acetate buffer, and 5) final polishing with gel filtration.
The end result is a highly pure and safe batch of albumin that is 100% non-pyrogenic, sterile, and free of active HIV virus. The product purity is greater than 98% and the protein content is about 50 g/L.
Read more about this topic: Chromatography In Blood Processing
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