For drug products manufactured in mammalian cells, safety assurance practices are needed during production to assure that the final medicinal product is safe from the potential risk of viral contamination. Virus filters provide viral retention for a range of viruses through robust, largely size-based retention mechanism. Therefore, a virus filtration step is commonly utilized in a well-designed recombinant therapeutic protein purification process and is a key component in an overall strategy to minimize the risks of adventitious and endogenous viral particles during the manufacturing of biotechnology products. This study summarizes the history of virus filtration, currently available virus filters and prefilters, and virus filtration integrity test methods and study models. There is also discussion of current understanding and gaps with an eye toward future trends and emerging filtration technologies.
Keywords: downstream bioprocessing; robustness; sieving; viral clearance validation; viral safety of biopharmaceuticals.
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