Dr. Debbie van der Burg
On 11 July 2023, Debbie van der Burg successfully defended her thesis entitled "Capillary Electrophoresis in Process Analytical Technology - Monitoring of biopharmaceutical cultivation processes". Debbie joined Kantisto October 2018 and worked fulltime on the Horizon 2020 IMI iConsensus project, while stationed at Byondis in Nijmegen. In November 2021, she moved to the Royal Technical University of Stockholm, KTH, to finish her iConsensus work. She currently works for MPYA Sci & Tech in Sweden.
In her thesis, Debbie provides an overview of capillary and microchip electrophoresis (CE resp. MCE) applications in the biopharmaceutical industry and focuses on the development of (M)CE applications for upstream process monitoring. Four methods were successfully developed for the monitoring of nutrients (mono- and disaccharides and vitamins) and for mAb concentration. The methods were developed to enable automation; they are robust and facilitate rapid analysis with minimal sample preparation requirements. The vitamins and mAb methods require no sample pretreatment or only a simple (automated) dilution. The saccharide method requires fluorescent derivatisation, which was developed to allow for automation in a closed system. Method optimisation with Design of Experiments optimised all significant factors simultaneously, reducing the number of experiments required. It provided information on the relationship between the tested factors and the response over the design space, including information on the influence of or the interaction between factors. To allow transfer from conventional CE to microchip CE (MCE), the CE methods were developed on capillaries with short effective lengths, similar to the separation length on chip. Additionally, fused silica chips were selected, as their surface chemistry is similar to fused silica capillaries commonly used for conventional CE. The method for saccharides was successfully transferred to MCE and the method for mAb concentration monitoring is ready for transfer to MCE. All developed methods show good potential for integration in the automated monitoring platform as well as for use as stand-alone PAT tools.
