Assisting continuous biomanufacturing through advanced control in downstream purification

Abstract

Aiming to significantly improve their processes and secure market share, monoclonal antibody (mAb) manufacturers seek innovative solutions that will yield improved production profiles. In that space, continuous manufacturing has been gaining increasing interest, promising more stable processes with lower operating costs. However, challenges in the operation and control of such processes arise mainly from the lack of appropriate process analytics tools that will provide the required measurements to guarantee product quality. Here we demonstrate a Process Systems Engineering approach for the design a novel control scheme for a semi-continuous purification process. The controllers are designed employing multi-parametric Model Predictive Control (mp-MPC) strategies and the successfully manage to: (a) follow the system periodicity, (b) respond to measured disturbances and (c) result in satisfactory yield and product purity. The proposed strategy is also compared to experimentally optimized profiles, yielding a satisfactory agreement.