Muhd. Ezza Faiez Othman

Case Study: Recombinant Bromelain Downstream Processing

This chapter presents details on the purification, formulation and drying of recombinant bromelain. The wide range of applications of recombinant bromelain has increased interest in finding viable purification techniques for large-scale production. An affinity chromatography technique was developed by Amid and co-workers (Expression, purification, and characterization of a recombinant stem bromelain from Ananas comosus, Process Biochem 46:2232–2239, 2011) to purify recombinant bromelain. However, this technique presented low recovery and small sample loading capacity and thus is not suitable as a purification tool in the large-scale production of recombinant bromelain. An aqueous two-phase system is one alternative method that we use to purify recombinant bromelain, as it reliable and easy to scale up and has a low cost. As part of avoiding cysteine degradation, spray drying the purified recombinant protein with maltodextrin as an excipient provides the possibility of preserving its activity and creating fine particles that are suitable for end-product application. The processes of the purification, formulation and spray drying of recombinant bromelain are explained briefly.

Economic and Environmental Evaluation of Recombinant Enzyme Production

Economic and environmental evaluation on three different throughputs and comparison between these throughputs were presented. Comparisons are based on simulation of 10, 100 and 1000 kg/batch of recBromelain using SuperPro Designer v8.5. The economic analysis shows that 100 kg/batch gives the most competitive price and maintaining a sizeable profit gross margin of 28.21 %. A positive ROI of 18.41 % and minimal payback time of 5.43 years is predicted from 100 kg/batch of production. Environment analysis showed that total waste and energy consumption increased as production size increased. This simulation information will assist to predict the cost and environment impact at different size of productions.