Prof. Maria Norberta de Pinho will give the next EMS webinar scheduled for monday June 23 at 4 pm CET on the EMS Youtube Channel.

Webinar Title:

An insight into the journey of a membranologists – Mixed Matrix Membranes for Protein-Bound Uremic Toxins Removal in Hemodialysis

Biography:

Prof. Maria Norberta de Pinho received her Bachelor’s in Chemical Engineering at the University of Porto (1970), M.Sc. (1974) and Ph.D. (1976) in Chemical Engineering at the University of Florida, USA. Following this, she was a Professor of Chemical Engineering at the Instituto Superior Técnico (IST), University of Lisbon, till 2015, after which she was a Jubilated (Emeritus) Professor at IST. She conducts her research at the Center for Advanced Materials Physics and Engineering (CeFEMA).

She has been a Visiting Researcher at Max-Planck Institut für Biophysik, Frankfurt (1977/78); National Research Council of Canada, Ottawa (1984/85); Verfahrenstechnik Institute, RWTH Aachen (Alexander von Humboldt Scholarship, 1986/87); MIT (2003); and Columbia University, NY (2014). In addition to being one of the authors of more than 200 publications and more than 200 books and conference proceedings, she also has 2 European and American patents to her name. She has been an active referee of journals such as Journal of Membrane Science, Desalination, AIChE Journal, Industrial & Engineering Chemistry Research, Polymer, etc.

During her career, she has supervised over 30 Master’s Dissertations and 20 Doctoral Theses and been a Researcher/Coordinator of over 35 projects sponsored by the Portuguese Science and Technology Foundation and the European Community, BRITE / EURAM (1991-1994); ECSC Coal Research (1997-2000). She has been a member of various scientific advisory committees evaluating European and International grants. Notably, she was one of the Board of Directors of European Membrane Society from 1994 – 1998 and a Member of the Membrane Working Party of European Federation of Chemical Engineering.

Abstract:

Adsorption therapies have emerged in hemodialysis as an innovative approach for removing protein-bound uremic toxins (PBUTs). This presentation will address the enhancement of the adsorption capacity of hemodialysis membranes through the incorporation of a Metal-Organic Framework (MOFs) in a cellulose acetate (CA)/silica (SiO₂) matrix.

The membranes were synthesized by coupling the phase inversion technique with the sol-gel method in acidic conditions to ensure the covalent bonding of the silica to the CA structure. The MOF, UiO-66, was synthesized, characterized and dispersed in the membrane casting solutions to yield the membranes, CA/SiO2/UiO-66. All the membranes were characterized by the hydraulic permeability, molecular weight cut-off (MWCO) and rejection coefficients to p-cresyl sulfate (pCS), bovine serum albumin (BSA) and pCS+BSA solutions.

The hydraulic permeabilities ranged from 12.1 – 30.0 kg m⁻² h⁻¹ bar⁻¹ and the MWCO ranged from 7 – 16 kDa. For feed model solutions of 100 ppm pCS and 35 g L^-1 BSA, simulating a hemodialysis session, membranes without MOF showed pCS rejection coefficients of 24.8%. Incorporating MOFs significantly improved permeation performance, with 0.2% rejection coefficients to pCS for the CA22/SiO2/UiO-66 membrane having 1.5% MOF, while the removal capacity of pCS bound to BSA was 99.8%. The incorporation of UiO-66 in mixed matrix membranes leads to the preferential adsorptive character of pCS bound to BSA, and envisages their potential application for PBUTs removal in hemodialysis.