J.D. Oxley, C. Castilla-Gutierrez, S.R. Collazos, C.H. Garza, E.R. Garza, K.J. Lange, M.M. Mamori, A.M. Zwiener
Southwest Research Institute,
United States
Keywords: drying, viability, energy consumption
Summary:
Drying biopharmaceuticals offers multiple advantages including enhanced stability, formulation support, and incorporation into a variety of finished products. As related uses and application areas increase, the demand for sustainable lower production costs and increased product stability follows. Two of the most common methods for drying include lyophilization and spray drying. Lyophilization offers a slow and gentle approach to drying, while spray drying provides higher throughput with a higher risk of product degradation. The recent commercialization of electrostatic spray drying expands the accessibility of a scalable lower temperature alternative to conventional spray drying and may serve as a higher throughput alternative to lyophilization. The presented study will cover recent work to evaluate the energy consumption and viability of Lacticaseibacillus rhamnosus GG (LGG) with pilot-scale conventional spray drying, electrostatic spray drying, and lyophilization. Energy consumption of the primary utilities was monitored along with LGG viability immediately and 8–12 weeks after drying. With regards to removal of water, conventional spray drying was the most energy efficient (1.2 kWh/L), followed by electrostatic spray drying (10.9 kWh/L) and lyophilization (16.9 kWh/L). When normalized against recovered viable LGG, electrostatic spray drying was the most efficient at 4.6x1010 CFU/kWh, followed by lyophilization and conventional spray drying at 1.1x1010 CFU/kWh and 4.8x107 CFU/kWh, respectively. These results with LGG serve as example that can be extrapolated to numerous thermally sensitive biopharmaceutical products or intermediates.