Current practices with commercial scale bovine lactoferrin production and alternative approaches

Lactoferrin is a versatile protein present in most bodily fluids of mammals. Because more and more important functions of lactoferrin in the human body are being discovered, the interest in its industrial production and application in consumer goods is increasing accordingly. Today, lactoferrin is primarily isolated from bovine milk or sweet whey using cation exchange column chromatography – a costly but efficient high-throughput process profitable for large-scale manufacturers. We provide a detailed comparison of commercial scale bovine lactoferrin production processes, and examine existing alternative pilot scale approaches. Here, the commercial scale state of the art serves as a benchmark to assess the feasibility of these alternative lactoferrin production processes for small-scale manufacturers or individual dairies. Whereas established industrial productions increasingly focus on skim milk as feed material, alternative productions employing dairy by-products, such as acid whey, are also able to produce equally high-quality lactoferrin.