SAFC integrated chiral chemistry offer

Sigma-Aldrich has announced that its custom manufacturing and services business unit, SAFC, will consolidate its chiral chromatography screening and small-scale purification operations and locate them at its Pharmorphix Solid State Research Laboratories in Cambridge, UK, to support its new integrated chiral chemistry offer. SAFC offers a range of chiral services that are applicable for a wide range of markets, from early-stage drug discovery to route optimisation and product development, through gram to multi-kilo scale up. The laboratories are expected to be validated and fully operational in July 2012.

The Cambridge facility will become the worldwide hub for the chiral service offering, which ranges from chiral gas chromatography (GC) and liquid chromatography (LC) separations, to large-scale crystallisation, Simulated moving bed (SMB) separations and production of enantiomerically pure active pharmaceutical ingredients (APIs). The consolidation of chiral services will provide customers with a single point of contact from the development stage through scale up.

The SAFC chiral offering already includes separation by commercial-scale SMB chromatography, chiral preparative HPLC, separation by crystallisation of diastereomeric salts and determination of the absolute stereochemistry by single crystal X-ray diffraction. SAFC Chiral Services, combined with Supelco and Aldrich products for chiral chromatography and chemical synthesis, give Sigma-Aldrich a wide portfolio of capabilities and services to support pharmaceutical, agrochemical, fine chemicals and food and fragrances companies from early research to final production of high-quality enantiomerically pure compounds.