GE Healthcare announces new facility to improve purification

GE Healthcare has announced the opening of a new biotechnology centre in the UK to help improve the purification steps within manufacturing.

Based at the Stevenage Bioscience Catalyst (SBC) Open Innovation Campus, the centre will begin producing a fiber-based purification platform in the first half of 2019.  

The platform will comprise material with a unique proprietary structure, giving it the potential to improve process speed, flexibility and robustness during the purification steps of biopharmaceuticals, gene therapies and viral vectors.

The fiber-based purification products will be prepared in Stevenage before being further processed and finished in GE Healthcare’s existing manufacturing facility in Cardiff, Wales.

“This technology will bring real efficiency and productivity advantages for biopharmaceutical manufacturers as they move towards integrated, connected or continuous operations,” said Olivier Loeillot, general manager, BioProcess at GE Healthcare Life Sciences. “The fiber-based chromatography technology developed and manufactured in Stevenage will extend GE Healthcare’s start-to-finish bioprocess purification portfolio.”

The purification technology comes as part of GE Healthcare’s acquisition of Puridify, a spin-out of University College London (UCL) founded in 2013. Puridify is based at the bio-incubator facility at the SBC, where GE Healthcare maintains an open laboratory aimed at providing SBC tenants with affordable access to advanced protein and cell analysis technologies.