Purolite Life Sciences today announced a new state of the art facility that will produce agarose resins based on technology developed at Llantrisant, which is Purolite’s R&D Centre of Excellence.

Agarose resins are an integral technology used by pharmaceutical developers in the manufacture of modern monoclonal medicines targeting the treatment of cancer, rheumatoid arthritis and well known age related diseases.  The market MAbs continues to grow, with worldwide revenues in 2015 exceeding $85 billion.

For 35 years Purolite, a US based company has developed innovative technology used globally in chemical processing, pharmaceuticals (active pharmaceutical ingredients), mining, water purification and food and beverage processing.

Don Brodie, Executive Vice President from Purolite said: “Security of supply is very important for our customers and this investment allows us to address large scale demands for our Praesto™ agarose resins.  Once online this will provide 30% of the world’s capacity for agarose reins”, he then added “Combining 35 years of resin knowledge, quality, manufacturing and regulatory experience we are able to provide our customers with the very best agarose chromatography solutions”

A pilot plant for agarose production has been in operation for a year, having been expanded earlier in February.

Purolite has just launched its latest protein-A agarose based resin.  Praesto™ AP which utilises an alkaline tolerant protein-A giving high capacities of over 60 g/L and over 250 cycles reuse.