We’re expanding!
2020 has been a strange old year for all of us. Plans have been postponed, conferences cancelled and face-to-face meetings with clients seem like a distant memory. Thankfully, there have still been some positives to come out of this year at Reach! We’ve been able to expand our facilities and create a dedicated lab for large scale purification.
Why the expansion?
Firstly, the growth in demand for development scale chiral separations. The past few years have been characterised by a consistent increase in enquiries for chiral separations of >100g racemate. Secondly, we’ve also seen increased interest in impurity isolations, requiring us to process large quantities of crude material to obtain enriched fractions. Whilst our existing facilities were able to cope, creation of a new facility has allowed us to streamline things and reduce processing time, as well as the impact on discovery scale operations.
The new facility
The new premises comprises of 1,580 square feet of laboratory and office space at Biocity. The lab space will soon feature two large ABsys SFC systems and a Gilson HPLC system which will focus on processing large amounts of material for chiral separations and impurity isolations.
Gas delivery and storage can be an issue with heavy usage of SFC, with cylinders quickly clogging up a laboratory. To solve this issue, our new facility has a dedicated gas delivery room. This houses all the CO2 required for SFC operations and is delivered to the instruments via a booster pump. This simple upgrade in infrastructure vastly reduces the time spent swapping out gas cylinders and creates a safer working environment for the team.
To compliment the high flowrates required to separate large amount of material, we’ve invested in new technologies to keep up with solvent evaporation. The new kit includes; a new large freeze-drier, a large 20L rotary evaporator and more self-filling continuous rotary evaporators. Highly efficient solvent removal allows us to run instruments for longer, opening up an opportunity for 24/7 processing.
The new lab space also comes a sleek new office to house our non-lab based team. This upgrade in office space will provide the perfect setting for meetings and is also well equipped for video conferencing as we continue to negotiate the ongoing effects of the pandemic.
To read the press release on the new laboratory, click here.
To find out more about our services, click here.