Company Announcements

CDMO firm Cobra Biologics announced in September a collaboration with the UK-based Center for Process Innovation and GE Healthcare Life Sciences, funded by a £0.57 million ($0.67 million) Innovate UK grant. The project aims to increase the robustness and reduce costs for the manufacturing of adeno-associated virus (AAV) vectors. The project will extend the advantages of GE Healthcare’s Puridify fiber-based chromatography technology platform and develop a multistep fiber-based chromatography purification process for AAV.

GE Healthcare opened in November a biotechnology manufacturing center at the Stevenage Bioscience Catalyst (SBC) Open Innovation Campus, in Stevenage, UK. In the first half of 2019, the center will begin producing a fiber-based purification platform, which has the potential to significantly improve efficiency in the purification steps of manufacturing biopharmaceuticals, gene therapies and viral vectors. Additional products will also be produced at the center to serve both laboratory and clinical applications.

In September, SiliCycle, a provider of silica-based products, received a CAD 1 million ($0.76 million) repayable contribution from Canada Economic Development for Quebec Region to assist the company in diversifying its markets through the development and commercialization of products that result from the conversion of residual biomass.

Novasep announced in October a partnership with Solanic, an AVEBE company, to industrialize its purification process to produce high-performance potato proteins for the food industry. The installations are the first industrial compact-bed chromatography systems for vegetable proteins purification.

In November, Cobra Biologics announced a £1.5 million ($1.9 million) shared Innovate UK grant with Pall and the Cell and Gene Therapy Catapult to investigate continuous manufacturing of AAV for gene therapy applications. The work will involve in-process analytical techniques and manufacturing approaches based on continuous chromatography platforms to significantly increase process yields, including Pall’s Cadence BioSMB system.

In December, Purolite named Iowa-based Global Water Services as the midwest distribution point for Purolite ion exchange, adsorbent and other resin products.

Product Introductions

In October, MilliporeSigma launched the Eshmuno CP-FT resin, calling it a first-of-its-kind CEX chromatography resin for the flow-through removal of aggregates from mAb therapeutics. The resin uses flow-through frontal chromatography.

In November, Trace Elemental Instruments launched the XPREP C-IC, calling it the world’s first automated combustion-IC sample preparation system. It samples = combustion gas and automatically transfers the condensed samples towards the IC.

Shimadzu Scientific Instruments released in November its new Shimpack Velox columns with core shell technology. The currently available phases are SP-C18, C18, biphenyl, PFPP and HILIC.

Sales and Orders of Note

Allotrope Foundation, an international consortium of 14 global biopharmaceutical companies, selected TetraScience to standardize chromatography data captured by Waters Empower 3 Software through conversion to the Allotrope Data Format (ADF) for an Allotrope Community Project.