Billerica, MA — EMD Millipore, the Life Science division of Merck KGaA, Darmstadt, Germany, today announced an expansion of its intellectual property around chromatographic membranes. EMD Millipore has exclusively licensed Patent No. 5,547,576, filed in the US from Terumo Kabushiki Kaisha of Japan, which covers grafted primary amines on a membrane. The addition of this IP further demonstrates EMD Millipore’s position as a leader in the chromatography membrane market.

“Membrane Chromatography is a vital component of our Chromatography portfolio that allows EMD Millipore to provide customers with a comprehensive solution including resins, membranes and disposable technology,” said Vin Donovan, Vice President of Biopharm Process Solutions. “This particular patent, coupled with our existing patent applications for ChromaSorb™, reaffirms our leadership position on these disruptive membrane technologies and gives our customers new tools to overcome their downstream manufacturing bottlenecks.”

The ChromaSorb™ membrane device is optimized to replace the anion column in a traditional three column template. Designed for flow through applications in the polishing step, ChromaSorb™ utilizes a primary amine as a ligand, allowing it to retain excellent capacity at high salt concentrations so customers can process their feedstreams without dilution. This provides all the benefits of membrane chromatography (faster flow rates and smaller footprint) resulting in reduced buffer consumption. Traditional anion membranes require low salt conditions forcing manufacturers to use large volumes of buffer for dilution. ChromaSorb™ breaks this bottleneck, providing an innovative solution for EMD Millipore customers.

About EMD Millipore

EMD Millipore is the life science division of Merck KGaA of Germany and offers a broad range of innovative, performance products, services and business relationships that enable our customers’ success in research, development and production of biotech and pharmaceutical drug therapies. Through dedicated collaboration on new scientific and engineering insights, and as one of the top three R&D investors in the life science tools industry, EMD Millipore serves as a strategic partner to customers and helps advance the promise of life science.