SELECTIVE FILTRATION OF PLASMA PROTEINS

治疗性血浆置换具有重要的临床应用价值。 治疗各种免疫和代谢疾病，使用 在治疗自身免疫性疾病方面的特殊益处，如 类风湿关节炎。目前这种疗法的广泛使用，它 涉及移除和随后替换患者的血浆，是 受限于高昂的成本和潜在的相关并发症 使用外源替代液体，例如混合血浆，这些液体 回到了病人的身边。选择性蛋白质过滤可以提供一种 分离血浆中免疫球蛋白部分的廉价手段， 通常含有致病物质，来自白蛋白 碎片，然后可以安全地返回给患者。 尽管已经开发出的商用膜似乎具有 足够的性质来分离白蛋白和免疫球蛋白，以前的尝试 这种选择性的蛋白质分离通常是不成功的。 这一失败归因于许多不同的现象，但 大块运输和膜运输之间的耦合使它变得困难 为了确定这些现象中的哪一种实际上支配着通量和 临床设备中的分离效率。我们工作的目标是 确定决定滤液通量和蛋白质的机制 实验与理论相结合的分离效率研究 程序。这涉及到旨在分离和表征 数据采集条件下的重要物理现象 随后的分析相对直截了当。实验是 还建议为通量和蛋白质分离获得准确的数据 在实验室规模的错流过滤器中使用各种不同的 具有非常不同的物理和化学特性的聚合物膜 属性。从这些研究中获得的物理洞察力将会 应用于临床/工业设备的分析 白蛋白和免疫球蛋白的选择性过滤。

Therapeutic plasmapheresis has important clinical applications in the treatment of a variety of immunologic and metabolic disorders, with particular benefits in the treatment of autoimmune diseases like rheumatoid arthritis. Widespread use of the current therapy, which involves removal and subsequent replacement of the patient's plasma, is limited by the large cost and potential complications associated with the use of exogenous replacement fluids, e.g. pooled plasma, that are returned to the patient. Selective protein filtration can provide an inexpensive means for separating the immunoglobulin fraction of plasma, which generally contains the pathogenic species, from the albumin fraction, which can then be safely returned to the patient. Although commercial membranes have been developed that appear to have adequate properties for separating albumin and IgG, previous attempts at this selective protein separation have generally been unsuccessful. This failure has been attributed to a number of different phenomena, but the coupling between bulk and membrane transport has made it difficult to determine which of these phenomena actually govern flux and separation efficiency in clinical devices. The objective of our work is to identify the mechanisms that determine filtrate flux and protein separation efficiency using a coordinated experimental and theoretical program. This involves experiments designed to isolate and characterize the important physical phenomena under conditions where data acquisition and subsequent analysis are relatively straightforward. Experiments are also proposed to obtain accurate data for flux and protein separation efficiency in a laboratory scale cross-flow filter using a variety of polymeric membranes with very different physical and chemical properties. The physical insight obtained from these studies will then be applied to the analysis of clinical/industrial devices for the selective filtration of albumin and IgG.