Many people suffer from acute and chronic hepatitis, cirrhosis and hepatocellular carcinoma caused by Hepatitis B virus (HBV) infection in the world especially in East Asia and Africa. The most effective way to prevent the diseases is injecting hepatitis B vaccine.

Now, recombinant HBsAg (rHBsAg) is the most widely used vaccine due to its safety and high-level expression. However, rHBsAg purification is a bottleneck because of the complexity of the vaccine. During purification, rHBsAg particles are often adsorbed irreversibly onto the chromatographic adsorbents and inactivated, and therefore rHBsAg recovery and purification factor are always low, leading to a high production cost of the vaccine.

Researchers from Institute of Process Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences (IPE-CAS) made progress in HIC process of hepatitis B surface antigen (rHBsAg). They achieved high purity and high bioactivity recovery by regulating surface hydrophobicity of the adsorbent.

According to their earlier research, a combination of chromatographic technologies had been used in the purification of CHO-rHBsAg. Based on the results, they carried out a strategy to design the optimal adsorbent. Through introduction of a suitable spacer arm and optimization of the ligand density, the surface hydrophobicity of the adsorbent was deliberately manipulated, resulting in an extraordinarily improved purity and recovery of CHO-rHBsAg.

The main results of this research have been published on Journal of Separation Science.