GE Healthcare brings purification tech to Stevenage
17 Jan 2019 by Evoluted New Media
GE Healthcare has announced a new biotechnology-manufacturing centre in Stevenage.
The centre, based at Stevenage Bioscience Catalyst Open Innovation Campus, will start producing a fibre-based purification platform in the first half of 2019.
The platform comprises material with a unique proprietary structure and could improve the purification steps of manufacturing biopharmaceuticals, gene therapies and viral vectors.
Olivier Loeillot, general manager of BioProcess at GE Heatlhcare Life Sciences, said: “This technology will bring real efficiency and productivity advantages for biopharmaceutical manufacturers as they move towards integrated, connected or continuous operations.
“The fibre-based chromatography technology developed and manufactured in Stevenage will extend GE Healthcare’s start-to-finish bioprocess purification portfolio.”
The facility incorporates 3,000 square feet of cleanroom space and will bring the amount of people at GE Healthcare Stevenage to 20. Fibre-based purification products will be prepared in Stevenage before being processed and finished in GE Healthcare’s manufacturing facility in Cardiff.
The purification technology to be produced at the new facility came to GE Healthcare as part of the acquisition of Puridify in November 2017, a spin-out of University College London.
GE Healthcare said biopharmaceuticals are the world’s fastest-growing class of medicine, estimated at more than $200 billion and growing 8 percent annually.
