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 e 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.