Friday, May 23, 2008
Virus Filtration Membranes from Nanoporous Block Copolymers
Filed under: Nanomedicine
Nanowerk's Michael Berger is running a report about work being conducted by Dr. Jin Kon Kim and colleagues at the Department of Chemical Engineering at Pohang University of Science Technology (POSTECH) in South Korea, who are developing nanotechnology-based virus filtration membranes.
A snippet from the report:
Separation and purification of bio-molecules such as proteins and viruses are important processes in the biotechnology industry. The risk of contamination with either known or unknown viruses in biological or therapeutic products require production processes that - ideally - completely eliminate the risks of virus contamination. Since the existence of very small amounts of viruses with a size of tens of nanometers causes severe damage to the entire bio-process, the filtration of viruses has to be pretty much perfect..."We have already successfully employed nanoporous films for the filtration of the common cold virus" Dr. Jin Kon Kim tells Nanowerk. "These membranes exhibit uniform sizes of pores due to the self-assembly nature of their fabrication but they have some limitations such as low mechanical and chemical stability in order to be widely used for effective virus filtration. For instance, they show many cracks after a filtration process at high pressure, say 0.4 bar; but a high filtration pressure is necessary to increase flux and effectively filter waterborne viruses."
Read: Nanotechnology virus filtration membranes...
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