Development and characterization of affinity- and pseudo-affinity-based methods for cell culture-derived influenza virus capturing

Influenza is one of the most worldwide-spread diseases, which infects several million people every year. Besides antiviral medical treatments, prophylactic vaccinations are crucial for controlling seasonal influenza epidemics. Hence, every year large amounts of vaccine doses have to be produced. Conventionally, embryonated chicken eggs are used for human influenza vaccine production. However, this production process has only a Iimited scalability. In addition, these vaccines contain egg-derived proteins, which may cause allergie reactions. Hence, cell culture-based vaccine production processes have been developed, which require an adapted downstream processing strategy for virus purification.

The scope of this dissertation was the development of affinity- as weil as pseudo-affinitybased chromatographie unit operations for the downstream processing of cell culture-derived influenza virus particles. Therefore, two major approaches were investigated: lectin-based affinity chromatography and sulphated cellulose matrices-based pseudo-affinity chromatography. In both fields membrane- and bead-based techniques were considered and compared.