Benefits of a Mixed-Mode Stationary Phase to Address the Challenging Purification of an Industrially Relevant Peptide: A Proof-of-Concept Study

Peptides are a class of biomolecules with a great potential from the therapeutic point of view, because of their unique biological properties. Industrially, the production stategies adopted produce both the target peptide and a series of impurities that must be removed. Preparative chromatography is the technique of choice for the large-scale purification of biomolecules, generally performed in reversed-phase mode, using hydrophobic adsorbents (e.g., C8 stationary phases). A promising and innovative alternative is represented by mixed-mode columns, which bear two different ligands on the particle surface, exploiting two different retention mechanisms to improve the separation. This work represents a proof-of-concept study focused on the comparison of a hydrophobic adsorbent and a mixed-mode one (bearing both hydrophobic groups and charged ones) for the purification of a crude peptide mixture. Thanks to more-favourable thermodynamics, it was found that, when collecting the whole peak excluding fractions of the peak tail, the mixed-mode column led to an increase in the recovery of roughly +15%, together with a slight improvement in purity at the same time, with respect to the traditional hydrophobic column. In addition, if the whole peak, including the tail, is collected, the performance of the two columns are similar in terms of purity and recovery, but the pepetide elutes as a narrower peak with the mixed mode. This leads to a collection pool showing a much-higher peptide concentration and to lower solvent volumes needed, which is a beneficial achievement when targeting more sustainable processes. These results are very advantageous from the industrial viewpoint, because they also involve a decrease in the peptide amount contained in the peak tail, which must be reprocessed again to satisfy purity requirements.