This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase IB project is an effort to nano-enhance fiber materials in order to capture parvoviruses. Specifically, the company will employ and seek to understand vapor-phase deposition technology as it applies to fiber materials to convert low-cost fiber materials into effective virus capture devices. Purification accounts for a large portion of biopharmaceutical product cost. Further, the extremely expensive parvovirus capture devices currently available are not suitable for large-scale operations, such as those involved in biomanufacturing streams. This work will build upon previous fundamental advances at the company regarding the nano-enhancement of nonwovens. The successful completion of this project will result in low-cost, efficient parvovirus removal membranes for use in aqueous streams such those in biopharmaceutical production. The intellectual merit associated with this project is the development of a fundamental understanding of fibrous surface modification through vapor phase deposition techniques, thus enabling the technology for use in other applications.
The broader/commercial impact of the project is that the surface modification technology to be developed could have considerable impacts in bio-materials and bio-functionalization. This project is focused on removal of parvoviruses from aqueous streams within biomanufacturing processes with the use of nonwoven base materials, thereby drastically reducing the expense associated with virus filtration. The improved understanding of cost-effective, fiber-based filtration materials and devices has the potential to make parvovirus capture feasible within the water purification industry and may even address emerging issues in nanotechnology processing, such as carbon nanotube or functional nanoparticle capture and collection, which would avoid potential toxic effects of materials engineered at the atomic scale.
