It is most important for development of separation media for high-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) to improve separation performance. At the same time, miniaturization and advanced features of materials have been demanded. In a pharmaceutical field as well as an environmental field and a synthetic chemistry field, it is necessary to reduce time and cut costs. Especially, macromolecules such as an antibody drug and an extracellular vesicle play a key role in development of drug medicines, although the exiting separation media cannot make the separation efficiently and fulfill the demands above.

For the present HPLC, the use of columns packed particle is more general. In addition, monolithic columns with continuous through-pore are also employed. The spongy monolith (SPM) column developed at Kyoto University is a superior permeable separation medium involving through- pores of 5 μm- hundreds μm, which are notably huge pores among the typical monolithic columns. In the case of the SPM made of poly(ethylene-co-glycidyl methacrylate) (PEGM), wide range of protein ligands can easily bind with epoxide groups that are highly reactive on the surface of the SPM media. Thus, SPM has drawn attention as a novel separation medium for the next generation that achieved high selectivity and high throughput.