Poster prize awarded to Sofia Carvalho, PhD student at the iBET’s Animal Cell Technology Unit

Sofia Carvalho, a PhD student from Animal Cell Technology Unit at iBET received the third place in the “Best Poster Award” at the PREP 2016 Conference, held in Philadelphia, USA.  PREP is the most internationally recognized conference for the presentation and discussion of the latest developments driving the field of Preparative & Process Chromatography, Separation Science and Technology. The awarded poster presentation describes part of Sofia's PhD work on a process design strategy to monitor and improve the purification of influenza virus-like particles (VLPs). The process makes use of a click-chemistry approach that fluorescently tags VLPs without affecting particle size, charge and biological activity. The developed platform allows the on-line/at-line monitoring of the VLP Influenza purification process and the discrimination and separation between VLPs and baculovirus, the major impurity of the process. This approach is a valuable tool to monitor and optimize downstream processing of virus related biopharmaceuticals. The work was developed in collaboration with the Physical Biochemistry of Drugs & Targets and Chemical Biology & Pharmaceutical Biotechnology Laboratories, from Institute of Molecular Medicine, School of Medicine, University of Lisbon.