JNC has reported purification data for its development-stage Cellufine MLP DexS resin showing a 13-fold concentration of inactivated influenza virus alongside a 90.3% reduction in protein impurities. In testing with human coronavirus OC43, the company measured a 97.3% cut in protein impurities with 91% virus recovery.

The Japanese company presented those figures at BioProcess International 2026 (BPI26), where it showcased its Cellufine cellulose-based chromatography portfolio together with the monolith-like particle (MLP) platform now under development. The numbers matter for downstream teams wrestling with a structural shift in bioprocessing: the products manufacturers need to purify — viral vectors, vaccines, and other complex biologics — are getting bigger, and conventional porous media often struggle to give bulky targets access to ligands inside the bead.

The MLP platform attacks that problem through bead architecture. Rather than relying on the pore structures of standard chromatography media, MLP uses a large-pore cellulose bead design intended to let large biological targets enter the bead, interact with the ligand, and separate from process-related impurities. Chigusa Mori, an R&D scientist at JNC, detailed the design in a presentation titled "Cellufine MLP: Wide Pore Cellulose Base Bead 3D Architecture for Large Biomolecule Chromatography Applications."

Two development-stage products

JNC used poster presentations at the conference to highlight two MLP products still in development. One covers Cellufine MLP DexQ for separating empty and full adeno-associated virus (AAV) particles — a persistent and costly purification challenge in AAV manufacturing, where empty capsids compete with full ones for binding sites and complicate analytics downstream. The other covers Cellufine MLP DexS for viral-vector purification more broadly.

DexS uses dextran sulfate as its ligand, and JNC is investigating it for large-particle applications including vaccines. The influenza and OC43 results above come from that program. The company did not report comparative data against established resins at the same conditions, and the reported figures come from JNC's own testing rather than independent evaluation — a caveat worth weighing when benchmarking against incumbent anion-exchange or affinity approaches for viral products.

Pore architecture as a process variable

For downstream developers, the showcase underscores a point that is becoming harder to ignore: pore architecture is no longer a resin-design detail. It can determine how effectively a large target enters the bead at all, which in turn constrains dynamic binding capacity, residence time, and the overall economics of column-based purification for particulate products. As therapeutic modalities move beyond traditional proteins toward particles and assemblies with very different physical properties, resin selection increasingly shapes what a downstream process can achieve rather than simply how well it performs.

Cellulose as a base matrix carries its own trade-offs. JNC's Cellufine line has a long history in biopharmaceutical purification, and the MLP work extends that foundation rather than replacing it. Whether the large-pore design can deliver consistent performance at manufacturing scale — where pressure-drop constraints and batch-to-batch bead uniformity become decisive — remains the open question, and JNC has not yet published scale-up data for either DexQ or DexS.

By bringing MLP technology to BPI26, JNC positions large-pore cellulose chromatography as one route to extending conventional column purification into applications where the size of the product itself increasingly shapes process performance. The company's next disclosures on DexQ's empty/full capsid selectivity and on DexS behavior with additional vaccine targets will indicate whether the platform can move from development-stage data to a validated manufacturing option.