As the interactions of phage with mammalian innate and adaptive immune systems are better delineated and with our ability to recognize and eliminate toxins and other potentially harmful phage gene products, the potential of phage therapies is now being realized. Early efforts to use phage therapeutically were hampered by inadequate phage purification and limited knowledge of phage-bacterial and...

Membrane technology has emerged as an attractive approach for water purification, while mitigation of fouling is key to lower membrane operating costs. This article reviews various materials with antifouling properties that can be coated or grafted onto the membrane surface to improve the antifouling properties of the membranes and thus, retain high water permeance. These materials can be separ...

While extensively used as drugs, small synthetic molecules have not yet been widely applied in the industry as affinity ligands for the purification of biopharmaceuticals. Yet, a substantial amount of published research indicates that synthetic ligands, such as triazine scaffolds, amino acids, and peptides show a great deal of promise for becoming the next generation affinity ligands for biosep...

virulence of the opportunistic yeast, candida albieans, involves the interplay of many complex changes including the yeast-hyphae transition, which mainly involves protein changes. cell wall mannoproteins are found to be the main cause of adherence of c. albieans to epithel ial cells in the first step of an infection process. in the present study, cell wall mannoproteins of intact yeast were pu...

At the present time, the maintenance of the equipment becomes an essential task for any production system. This task is becoming more important from both the quantity and the quality points of view, particularly in developing countries. Initiating a maintenance system controlled by the computer will be valuable and effective. The developed expert system is a combination of an intelligent infere...

The pharmaceutical industry, particularly the small molecule domain, faces unprecedented challenges of escalating costs, high attrition as well as increasing competitive pressure from other companies and from new treatment modes such as biological products. In other industries, process improvement approaches, such as Lean Sigma, have delivered benefits in speed, quality and cost of delivery. Ex...

Background Visceral leishmaniasis, a disease caused by Leishmania infantum chagasi, represents a major public health problem in many areas of the world. Despite the considerable effort, there is no effective and safe vaccine for human use [1]. Some authors have reported that as much as 50% of overall costs in the biotechnology industries are related to downstream processing. Thus, the developme...

High-purity water treatment technology has progressed and changed significantly in recent years. Major trends include the wider variety of membrane processes driving an increasing share of purification, more use of reclaimed and recycled water, and treatment systems with more user-friendly interface. In addition, industry pure water requirements have also changed. Pharmaceutical waters now have...

Biosurfactants are microbial surface active compounds which, contrary to synthetic surfactants, are natural in origin, biodegradable and less toxic to a human organism. For that reason, there is a great research potential in studies aimed at their purification, finding potential ways of their utilization and decreasing their production costs. This paper demonstrates the process of isolating and...