Lucas Kimerer, a third-year Ph.D. candidate in chemical engineering at the University of Virginia School of Engineering and Applied Science, has received the Georges Guiochon Chromatography Award for the best poster at the 2018 Washington Chromatography Discussion Group Poster Session.The event was held Sept. 19 in Bethesda, Md.
Kimerer’s poster, “Displacement of Monomer-sized Bivalent Bispecific Antibody Charge Variants by Cation Exchange Chromatography,” earned him a travel grant to attend the 48th International Symposium on High-performance Liquid Phase Separations and Related Techniques (known as HPLC 2019) in Milan, Italy, next June. He plans to attend and will present at the Milan conference.
The Washington Chromatography Discussion Group is composed of local scientists in industry, academia and government who are active in separation science. For Kimerer, the meeting was a good opportunity to interact with graduate students and scientists in his field from around the D.C., Maryland and Virginia region. Winning the poster award will allow him to make connections with scientists internationally, as well.
Kimerer, who has a bachelor’s in bioengineering from the University of Maryland, works in Giorgio Carta’s Bioseparations Engineering Lab. Carta, UVA’s Lawrence R. Quarles Professor, has published extensively in the area of adsorption and ion exchange with emphasis on protein chromatography. Carta also chairs the annual International Symposium, Exhibit and Workshops on Preparative and Process Chromatography, known as PREP.
Kimerer’s work in the Carta lab focuses on how next-generation therapeutic, bivalent bispecific antibodies behave on chromatography resins.
“Understanding how these molecules behave during processing allows us to develop models that aid in manufacturing-scale purification of the drug from product-related variants and contaminants to ensure safe and pure pharmaceuticals,” Kimerer said.
For more information on the Washington Chromatography Discussion Group, visit washchrom.com.
