Merck as a competent and reliable partner to the pharmaceutical and bio-pharmaceutical industries for preparative and industrial chromatography

Darmstadt – At this year’s SPICA (www.spica2010.se), Merck will not only showcase a selection of its key focus products, but will also be represented with a presentation. Prof. Dr. Christian Frech will lecture on “Protein Adsorption and Transport in Cation Exchangers: Influence of Surface Modifications”. With its commit-ment at the symposium, Merck once again demonstrates its position as a global leader in preparative and industrial chromatography.

“Merck offers a wide range of customer-focused solutions in the field of chromatogra-phy. Whether it’s a matter of producing small-molecule pharmaceuticals or performing large-scale biotech processes, we have established ourselves as a competent and reliable partner in all fields,” says Dr. Elfriede Sextl, Marketing Manager at Merck KGaA. “Thoroughness and transparency are the basis of our success. Each individual produc-tion step is reproducible and close monitoring ensures that all purity requirements are met. The combination of expertise, decades of experience and a perfectly functioning quality management is the reason why customers all over the world place their trust in technologies from Merck.”

Biochromatography resins

Particularly in biomolecule purification, the importance of efficient and cost-effective purification possibilities is growing continuously. With the Eshmuno™ product line, Merck offers cation and anion exchangers that enable biomolecule purification at a high level of productivity. This opens up entirely new possibilities for the pharmaceutical industry in particular, e.g. for blood plasma purification or production of bioactive sub-stances, such as insulin. Merck offers further biochromatography resins under the product name Fractogel®. Besides the numerous Fractogel® ion exchange resins, Fractogel is also used successfully in size exclusion chromatography (SEC) and in immobilized metal affinity chromatography (IMAC).

Inorganic sorbents

Today Merck offers a wide portfolio of silica gels and aluminum oxides. With their con-trolled purity, non-toxicity and chemical stability, they are suitable for a broad spectrum of applications.

Standardized silica gels consist of highly pure silicon dioxide and were developed for adsorbing and purifying organic compounds and APIs (active pharmaceutical ingredi-ents). Like silica gel, aluminum oxides can adsorb organic compounds, but thanks to their ion exchange capability, they can also eliminate mineral acids and ions from solu-tions. Specially for preparative and industrial liquid chromatography, Merck offers the LiChroprep® product line, which is used particularly in the pharmaceutical and biopharmaceutical industries.