Technology Spotlight: Advanced 3D-Printed Column Technology — An Actual Paradigm Shift for Chromatography Manufacturing?

Traditionally the manufacture of HPLC media has been more of an art than science, according to Zhang, complicating consistency, method transfer, and scale-up. A large-scale, layer-by-layer 3D printing strategy that combines stereolithography and porogenic chemistry to produce chromatography media in diverse formats has been developed. This approach offers automated, scalable, and consistent production suited for both analytical and industrial bioprocessing, according to Zhang (1).

In the first part of this video interview Zhang discusses some of the limitations of previous 3D-printed manufacturing techniques for column technology and the benefits that the new stereolithographic-based technology could offer the separation science community.

Reference
Wen, H.; Lu, H.; Zhou, Z.; Sun, K.; Huang, Y.; Zeng, J.; Wang, Y.; Luo, L.; Xu, C.; Xu, J.; Zhang, X.; Wang, X.; Eeltink, S.; Zhang, B. Large Scale Printing of Robust HPLC Medium via Layer‑by‑Layer Stereolithography. Anal. Chem. 2025, 97 (9), 5014‑5021. DOI:10.1021/acs.analchem.4c05587 pubs.acs.org

About The Interviewee

Bo Zhang is an associate professor at Xiamen University in China. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry, serves on the Scientific Committee for HPLC2025, and is an Associate Editor for the Journal of Separation Science. He also holds a position on the Editorial Board of the Journal of Chromatography A.

His training in separation science began in 1999 at the National Chromatographic Centre, part of the Dalian Institute of Chemical Physics. He pursued a PhD in chromatography at the University of York in the UK from 2002 to 2007, followed by two years of postdoctoral research at Imperial College London. Since 2009, he has been at Xiamen University, where he leads a research group specializing in chromatography. His team's work focuses on column technology, the development of advanced chromatographic materials, and microfluidic systems for bioseparations