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Chromatography Separation Specifics

Custom chromatography support includes material analysis, resin development, and on-site visits

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Chromatography is an easy choice for separations during fine chemical manufacturing because it is useful for many kinds of molecules. Identifying optimal materials and operating conditions to separate compounds as varied as proteins, peptides, oligonucleotides, and small molecules requires hands-on attention.

Experts at Grace's Materials Technologies provide customized chromatography support for a variety of molecules in volumes from lab-scale to commercial production. Their experience with current good manufacturing practices (cGMP) ensures that customers’ materials will meet current safety and regulatory guidelines for purification and characterization. Grace’s chromatography specialists can also make on-site visits to support purification at scale.

Grace has been a leader in silica gel manufacturing for over 55 years. Unlike chromatography companies that start with procured silica, Grace’s silica gels are manufactured across its global network using high purity raw materials, with critical process parameters that are monitored from start to finish. The ability to control key physiochemical properties during manufacturing allows chromatography resins to be customized according to particle size, porosity, and functionality needs for a given separation.

Customized conditions include resins

When developing a separation process, Grace’s scientists and engineers first characterize physicochemical properties, such as molecular weight and solubility, of a customer’s material, including the impurities. With that information, they can identify optimal particle size, porosity, and functionality of a resin or silica gel used in a separation. They also evaluate solvent requirements, pressure drops during operation, and intended scale-up.

Grace’s scientists and engineers possess the know-how to develop and customize silica gel products, including standard gels and gels of various surface functionalization for normal- and reversed-phase, ion-exchange, and affinity chromatography. DAVISIL® chromatographic silica products, available in a variety of particle and pore sizes, exhibit superb batch-to-batch reproducibility and provide robust chromatographic performance over time.

Specialized VYDAC® reversed-phase chromatography resins excel in applications requiring protein, peptide, and oligonucleotide separations. VYDAC® resins are manufactured using proprietary silica gel synthesis and functionalization processes, designed to provide high protein recovery and purity.

At Grace, optimizing separations involves integrating expertise in materials, process development, and manufacturing. The company’s scientists can develop resins customized by particle size, porosity, or functionality. Its teams also perform chiral separations in-house using high-performance liquid chromatography.

Sustainable chromatography

Chromatography is also a part of sustainability efforts at Grace. Silica gels with high loading capacity, such as DAVISIL® chromatographic silica, reduce the number of purification campaigns required to obtain a total quantity of target molecule. In turn, this results in the reduction of total solvent volume used and disposed as hazardous waste.  Grace also offers chromatography products to separate precious metals used in manufacturing for recycling and reuse.

The life cycle of a fine chemical at Grace involves an integrated team of scientists, chemical engineers, and operations experts throughout development and manufacturing. The team considers scale-up even during the early process stages, so efforts to optimize separations for higher yields require fewer changes because potential challenges can be caught early.

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