At BioProcess International West (March 2018) Maribel Rios, Managing Director at BioProcess International, caught up with Dr Joswin Kattoor, Product Manager Pharma at DPL (Dr Paul Lohmann) for BPI TV.

DPL manufacture a wide range of organic and inorganic salts, producing 400 products. According to Dr Kattoor, their biopharma customers are most often looking for speed to market – “raising a new product from initial discovery, to manufacturing, to product launch without failing in a clinical trial.”Salts play various roles in both upstream and downstream bioprocessing. For upstream, salts can offer nutrition to the cell, support fermentation and act as a buffering agent. As an upstream example, Dr Kattoor explains that “iron is essential for respiration and metabolism and it also protects cells from oxidative damage; ferrous sulphate does a good job of that. So with the appropriate salts you get a better cellular bioavailability, but if the bioavailability gets too concentrated, it gets toxic to the cell. So the challenge here is to find a balance and to regulate the bioavailability to the cell.” Equally, for downstream, sodium sulphate for example “does a very good job of protein purification,” while sodium phosphates “are very good as buffering agents.”

Dr Kattoor emphasizes that not all salts are equal: “we offer a wide range of sulphates, phosphates, acetates and citrates, but most importantly we are able to optimize and modify our salts in order to achieve characteristics which are crucial for bioprocessing.” He gives examples of particle size distribution, improved solubility, defined heavy metal content or minimized microbio contamination all impacting effectiveness of salts.