Scale-up from laboratory microfiltration to a ceramic pilot plant: Design and performance

A highly instrumented pilot microfiltration (MF) plant featuring a ceramic microfiltration membrane, back-pulsing device, permeate re-circulation in co-flow to achieve uniform transmembrane pressure (UTMP) and a cooling/temperature control system was designed, built and tested successfully with transgenic whole goat milk (TGM). In a previous study, it was shown that >90% of heterologous IgG could be recovered from TGM in the permeate by adopting close process control with low UTMP and operation at the iso-electric point (pI) of the target IgG. Here, these concepts were successfully employed to recover >90% of another IgG (pI = 7.1–7.5) from TGM by MF at the pilot-scale. The pilot plant MF system gave 90% yield for the same target protein with a 50% higher permeation flux rate (47 lmh instead of 32 lmh) and increased protein transmission (70% instead of 46%) as compared with the laboratory-scale MF unit. Thus, this study demonstrated the efficacy of the pilot MF plant and reinforced the generality at larger scale of the optimization methodology reported earlier by us.