President of ASI Life Sciences, Kent Smeltz, told in-Pharmatechnologist.com at this year’s Interphex that the deal would be a good fit to ASI’s current portfolio of products as Chromatan’s chromatography system is downstream, which would complement the mainly upstream hardware technology that ASI offers.
CEO of start-up company Chromatan, Oleg Shinkazh, also told us in New York that the strategic relationship would “take a very radical new technology to market that really addresses one of the major gaps in single-use bioprocessing… affinity chromatography.”
Shinkazh continued to add that the combination of the two companies and the technologies they can now offer will replace “a very major piece of equipment, a large-scale chromatography column” which will "save clients 65% off their affinity chromatography costs in clinical manufacturing."
Single-Use technology was also a buzz-word at this year’s industry event and both Shinkazh and Smeltz expressed their opinions on the uptake of single-use systems.
Flexibility of manufacturing was a key benefit of single-use, according to Shinkazh who found most of his customers have initiatives to create new processes in single-use facilities.
Smeltz too acknowledged the expansion of single-use technologies though he said “there will always be a fit for stainless steel” and that both technologies “will co-exist for a long time.”
Smeltz continued to talk to us about how US clients were taking the knowledge and technologies of single-use and implementing them at their overseas facilities, as well as telling us about both ASI’s mixing technologies and its inSITE integrity test system, both of which it was showcasing at this year’s event.