Novel Green Preparative Methods Used for Biopharmaceutical Purification: An HTC-18 Interview with Martina Catani

At HTC-18 in Leuven, Executive Editor of LCGC International, Alasdair Matheson, spoke to Martina Catani from the University of Ferrara about her recent research focusing on novel green preparative methods used for biopharmaceutical purification.

Martina Catani is an assistant professor of analytical chemistry at the Department of Chemical, Pharmaceutical and Agricultural Sciences of the University of Ferrara, Ferrara, Italy. Martina works in the field of liquid chromatography (LC) for both analytical and preparative purposes. Her research activities revolve around applicative and fundamental aspects of LC separations. More recently, she has been focusing on novel analytical approaches in “omics science." She is the co-author of more than 70 papers in peer-reviewed journals and has presented her research activities as an invited speaker at high-level national and international meetings. She has been the recipient of many awards, including the “Csaba Horváth Young Scientist Award” conferred at HPLC 2018 in Washington (USA) and the 2024 “Emerging Leader in Chromatography Award” conferred by LCGC International.

In this video interview, Martina discusses the following topics:

• What preparative LC methods are used to purify therapeutic proteins and what are their limitations in terms of sustainability?

• Your group worked on a biopharmaceutical purification project to replace acetonitrile with green alternatives. What were your main findings?

• Is your new approach easy to implement to replace existing preparative LC methods in practice.

• Your group recently investigated multicolumn countercurrent solvent gradient purification (MCSGP). Can you define MCSGP?

• What are the advantages of MCSGP as a purification technique?

• What are the limitations of MCSGP?

• Where else could MCSGP possibly be used?