Stability of immunoadsorbents comprising antibody fragments. Comparison of Fv fragments and single-chain Fv fragments.

Immunoadsorbents comprising Fv fragments specific for hen egg lysozyme were used to recover the enzyme from a 20-fold excess of bovine albumin. We designed automatic equipment to run this model purification system for 100 cycles non-stop and monitored the deterioration of the immunoadsorbents during the cycling procedure. Only minor losses (approximately 25%) in the immunoadsorbents' capacity were detected; this correlated well with ligand loss (measured by enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay) which was approximately 0.2% per cycle. A surprising finding was that the use of "single-chain" Fv fragments conferred only a minor advantage with respect to stability of the immunoadsorbents.