A steady increase of product titers and the corresponding change in impurity composition represent a challenge for development and optimization of antibody production processes. Additionally, increasing demands on product quality result in higher complexity of processes and analytics, thereby increasing the costs for product work-up. Concentration and composition of impurities are critical for efficient process development. These impurities can show significant variations, which primarily depend on culture conditions. They have a major impact on the work-up strategy and costs. The resulting "bottleneck" in downstream processing requires new optimization, technology and development approaches. These include the optimization and adaptation of existing unit operations respective to the new separation task, the assessment of alternative separation technologies and the search for new methods in process development. This review presents an overview of existing methods for process optimization and integration and indicates new approaches for future developments.
Keywords: downstream processing; host cell proteins; process development; process integration; upstream processing.