SAFC to make Cambridge, UK worldwide hub for chiral services

Published: 11-Jun-2012

Appoints former Pfizer scientist to head chiral chromatography method development team


SAFC, the custom manufacturing and services business of Sigma-Aldrich, is consolidating its global chiral chromatography screening and small-scale purification operations and will locate them at its Pharmorphix Solid State Research Laboratories in Cambridge, UK.

The UK facility will now become the worldwide hub for SAFC’s chiral services, which range from chiral gas chromatography (GC) and liquid chromatography (LC) separations to large-scale crystallisation, simulated moving bed (SMB) separations and production of enantiomerically pure active pharmaceutical ingredients (APIs).

SAFC says this move will provide customers with a single, dedicated point of contact from the development stage through to scale-up.

Paul Rodwell, a former senior principal scientist with Pfizer, will lead SAFC's chiral chromatography method development team.

Analytical equipment is currently being installed at the Cambridge site, having been transferred from Supelco Analytical, a Sigma-Aldrich subsidiary based in Bellefonte, PA, where the chiral screening service was previously performed.

The chiral screening operation will continue to support the analytical chiral column business and will draw upon Supelco's analytical expertise to complement the solid-form characterisation and research services already located at the Cambridge site.

The new laboratories are expected to be validated and fully operational next month (July).

‘SAFC offers a robust, cohesive range of chiral services that are applicable for a wide range of markets, from early stage drug discovery to route optimisation and product development, through gram to multi kilo scale-up,’ said Rodwell.

The SAFC chiral offering already includes separation by commercial-scale SMB chromatography, chiral preparative HPLC, separation by crystallisation of diastereomeric salts and determination of the absolute stereochemistry by single crystal X-ray diffraction.

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