Economic simulation of batch and continuous aqueous two‐phase purification for viral products

Abstract Vaccine manufacturing strategies that lower capital and production costs could improve vaccine access by reducing the cost per dose and encouraging localized manufacturing. Continuous processing is increasingly utilized to drive lower costs in biological manufacturing by requiring fewer capital and operating resources. Aqueous two‐phase systems (ATPS) are a liquid–liquid extraction technique that enables continuous processing for viral vectors. To date, no economic comparison between viral vector purifications using traditional methods and ATPS has been published. In this work, economic simulations of traditional chromatography‐based virus purification were compared to ATPS‐based virus purification for the same product output in both batch and continuous modes. First, the modeling strategy was validated by re‐creating a viral subunit manufacturing economic simulation. Then, ATPS capital and operating costs were compared to that of a traditional chromatography purification at multiple scales. At all scales, ATPS purification required less than 10% of the capital expenditure compared to chromatography‐based purification. At an 11 kg per year production scale, the ATPS production costs were 50% less than purification with chromatography. Other chromatography configurations were explored, and may provide a production cost benefit to ATPS, but the purity and recovery were not experimentally verified. Batch and continuous ATPS were similar in capital and production costs. However, manual price adjustments suggest that continuous ATPS plant‐building costs could be less than half that of batch ATPS at the 11 kg per year production scale. These simulations show the significant reduction in manufacturing costs that ATPS‐based purification could deliver to the vaccine industry.