Gradipore to target chiral market

Hot on the heels of a new technology-exchange deal with Texas A&M University, Gradipore is to chase the chiral separation market with a product based its membrane purification technology.

The new process, which combines Gradiflow's membrane matrix filtering technology and single-isomer, fully-charged cyclodextrin marking compounds developed by the Texan research group, can filter chiral pharmaceuticals with almost 100 per cent results.

"This new approach is called iso-electric trapping (IET) and can produce chirals with a purity of up to 99.99 per cent in hours," claimed Gradipore COO Tim Wawn. He added the potential for the process when applied to the pharmaceutical manufacturing and testing process was "huge".

"This new approach allows us to purify same size, same charge chirals -- previously almost impossible to filter without low productivity chemical or mechanical processes," he said.

"It offers a significant opportunity in the drug discovery market, where chirals have been produced with significant side-effects that negate the advantage of the therapeutic value."

Chiral drugs such as the notorious Thalidomide can have 'mirror image' molecules with seriously negative effects, in addition to the benign molecules which (in Thalidomide's case) alleviated the symptoms of morning sickness. The ability to filter out all the 'bad' molecules would enable drug companies to rapidly ascertain if a compound was worth developing or not in a single chiral form.

"The use of IET would significantly help pharma on the path to drug discovery, and in deciding whether to continue with trials or kill off a drug," said Wawn.

Wawn said another advantage of IET was that it could be applied to many compounds, including virtually any biological compound or even chemical mixtures. This could also make it useful for cleaning drug candidates to extremely high levels of purity for use in trials.