2025 AIChE Annual Meeting

(564b) A Designer's Perspective on Sptff, and Some Ideas for Improvement

Authors

Xuechen Yin, Stony Brook University
As the biopharmaceutical industry has matured there has been an increasing focus on making biologics more efficiently and more affordably, in part through process intensification. Tangential flow filtration (TFF) is widely used in bioprocessing for product concentration, buffer exchange, and impurity separation. To enable process intensification new single-pass TFF (SPTFF) technologies have been designed to convert the more traditional recirculating batch processes into continuous, and often high-concentration, processes.

While the current SPTFF technologies have achieved their primary goal of continuous concentration and diafiltration, they have also come with some inherent drawbacks which have limited their industry adoption to date. For example, a longer path length through a device (resulting in a larger pressure drop) may not be a problem during operation but can create challenges during equilibration, sanitization, or product recovery. There are also operational challenges including facility footprint of the required buffer, automation in continuous operation, and material demand for process development.

This talk will cover the fundamentals of how SPTFF technology has been designed, and how some of these new challenges have been baked in. We will also discuss some ideas for improvements and the potential for the technology going forward.