PEGylation is a versatile drug delivery technique that presents a particularly wide range of conjugation chemistry and polymer structure. The conjugated protein can be tuned to specifically meet the needs of the desired application. In the area of drug delivery this typically means to increase the persistency in the human body without affecting the activity profile of the original protein. On the other hand, because of the high costs associated with the production of therapeutic proteins, subsequent operations imposed by PEGylation must be optimized to minimize the costs inherent to the additional steps. The closest attention has to be given to the PEGylation reaction engineering and to the subsequent purification processes. This review article focuses on these two aspects and critically reviews the current state of the art with a clear focus on the development of industrial scale processes which can meet the market requirements in terms of quality and costs. The possibility of using continuous processes, with integration between the reaction and the separation steps is also illustrated.
