Towards next generation high throughput ion exchange membranes for downstream bioprocessing: A review

Membrane chromatography is recognised as a potential solution to streamline downstream processing for protein purification, where ion exchange membrane chromatography (IEMC) as a polishing step to remove impurities has been successfully demonstrated in small scales. Despite limited commercial adoption in large-scale production, the concept of IEMC attracts many interests and tremendous progress is made. To fill the review gap for advancements in the last decade, this article provides a timely analysis on key performance-determining aspects in IEMC systems. Modern laboratory-made membranes with polymeric chains of tuneable surface area and charge allow for high binding capacity (up to 10-fold higher than that of traditional resins) while simultaneously mitigating the loss of permeance due to the introduction of grafted layers up to 40%. Nevertheless, robust evaluation are yet to be conducted. Despite making equal contribution to binding, the review on process-related work was supported by only