Bioprocessing technology and Protein A ligand supplier Repligen published its third quarter 2016 financials last week, and reported a 25% y-o-y rise in product revenue to $24.7m, attributed in part to sales of its OPUS-branded chromatography columns.
And sales of the prefilled offering are expected to continue to rise, the firm said, driven by a new resin recovery feature on its 45cm and 60cm which - according to spokeswoman Sondra Newman - positions Repligen alone amongst the main chromatography tech vendors.
“OPUS R columns feature a side port through which chromatography resins can be removed, following a defined protocol,” she told Biopharma-Reporter, adding the feature serves two main purposes.
“As an insurance policy to lower risk in the event of any process deviations - for example, accidental over pressurizing a column – [and it] gives flexibility to the end user to use resin after a campaign is finished for engineering, scale down and reuse of studies in process development.”
Her comments echoed CEO’s Tony Hunt who described the feature as “a differentiator in the whole pre-packing space” during a conference call last week. However, he also told stakeholders there will be a price increase associated with the new feature.
But according to Newman “the price increase will be nominal. The strategy with OPUS R is more focused on providing an important differentiator that our customers have been asking for.”
The feature – which was first launched at Biotech Week in Boston last month – will be standard on the two larger diameter Opus columns, as these represent where the resin investment is most significant, and will be implanted by the second quarter 2017.