Thermo Fisher Scientific

Your educational resource for biopharma, pharma, environmental, food and agriculture, industrial, and clinical labs

Accelerating ScienceAnalyteGuru / Biopharmaceutical / Resources for Understanding BioPharma Building Blocks With Ion Chromatography

Resources for Understanding BioPharma Building Blocks With Ion Chromatography

By 06.07.2023

Since the beginning of 2020, like many of you I have learned a lot about vaccines and the BioPharma Industry. In this blog post I’d like to share some of the things I’ve learned and provide you a number of resources for further study that you may find invaluable. First, some key vaccine definitions:

Adjuvants help to enhance the immune system’s response to the presence of an antigen. The inorganic adjuvant is usually a salt compound. They may contain various ions such as sulfate, phosphate, potassium, calcium, and magnesium, and many are aluminium based. As they are ionic salts, they are easily analyzed and quantified by ion chromatography with conductivity as detection with simple anion and cation methods, just like counterions in pharmaceuticals.

Live-attenuated vaccines are usually live pathogens from bacteria or a virus that have been attenuated or weakened.

Inactivated vaccines are created by inactivating a pathogen, typically using heat or chemicals such as formaldehyde, which can be easily detected using post-column with acetylacetone reagent to form a complex that is detectable by UV-Vis (425nm). Toxoid vaccines are like the inactivated pathogen vaccine, except the latter contains inactive toxin.

Subunit vaccines can be proteins, polysaccharides, peptide subunits, or conjugated vaccines with polysaccharide chains attached to carrier proteins. It contains only pieces of a pathogen, not the whole organism. Therefore, it cannot cause sickness.

  • Protein subunits are composed of protein or glycoprotein components of a pathogen that provide a protective immune response.
  • Polysaccharide subunits target an immune response to pathogenic bacteria encased in a layer of sugar.
  • Conjugated vaccines are like the polysaccharide subunits but attached to a protein also. It makes them more responsive than just the sugar.
  • Peptide subunits are synthetically made with peptides to mimic the epitopes of the antigen, which triggers direct or potent immune responses and needs an adjuvant to improve the response.

Messenger RNA (mRNA) and Viral vector vaccines both carry a genetic code that gets delivered to encourage our immunity response.

From all the information I have learned about vaccines, I have realized how important it is to understand them and their diseases. To understand, we must understand what vaccines and pathogens are built with. Like a house, there are many different building blocks to construct them. For instance, proteins and peptides consist of various amino acid units, and polysaccharides are units of smaller sugars. Understanding the breakdown products can help us design a better vaccine in the future. Next time you hear spiked protein, think about what they are composed of: Which amino acid? What different types of carbohydrates? What are the breakdown products? What are the units and patterns? Can we characterize them with all our information? Maybe, learn more by analyzing both amino acids and carbohydrates together with no derivatization.

BioPharma is not just about vaccines. There is also the big C word many people struggle to say —  “Cancer!” Many of us have either been through or know someone who suffered from it or lost someone dear to them. Me included.

The study of cells in Metabolomics is very important, especially in cancer research. It helps us understand how our body works with the way it transports and produces energy by producing unique metabolites. It applies to other species and plants too. Many studies look into how our environment affects metabolites. There are over 3000 metabolite compounds out there that are mostly known, but there are also many that we don’t know! Many talks from the Global IC Symposium 2023 demonstrated the importance.

To determine all possible groups of metabolites, we need a wide range of technology and techniques to ensure the best picture. We have shown that ion chromatography with mass spectrometry can help increase this type of study, as shown in the case study of Dr. James McCullagh’s laboratory at the University of Oxford.

Additional resources

Application notes of interest

Wai-Chi Man

Wai-Chi Man is Product Marketing Manager, IC/SP, for Thermo Fisher Scientific.