ChromaCon and LEWA sign License and Technical Collaboration Agreement

The companies have already started worldwide commercial collaboration activities to promote ChromaCon’s CaptureSMB chromatographic process technology which are implemented in the LEWA EcoPrime equipment platform at the GMP scale.

Under the agreement, ChromaCon has granted LEWA license rights to intellectual property developed by ChromaCon for twin column bed chromatography. These manufacturing rights cover the use CaptureSMB at the pilot and GMP scale and certain other ChromaCon process techniques. Additionally the parties agree to mutual collaboration in the process development, pilot and process scale.  The financial terms of the agreement were not disclosed

“This agreement enables clients to employ the GMP manufacturing technologies and global commercial reach of LEWA to further advance the use of ChromaCon’s CaptureSMB process,” said Michael Bavand, CEO at ChromaCon. “Furthermore, customers who have our entry-stage Contichrom laboratory systems will benefit from knowing they have the ability to scale up to LEWA EcoPrime chromatography GMP systems and the freedom to employ our proprietary process control principle, without violating future patent rights, when sourced from LEWA.”

The CaptureSMB process principle allows faster capture step processing, preserves protein integrity, increases economic use of Protein A resins and uses less space on the manufacturing floor. In addition, the commercial collaboration also includes the future development of novel continuous processing employing LEWA’s downstream suite of custom purification technologies and multi-unit control software expertise with certain ChromaCon technologies. This will allow the use of multiple process principles such as batch chromatography, sequential multi-column chromatography, CaptureSMB, and MCSGP process principle confined to the same platform.

Gerard Gach, Chief Marketing Officer of LEWA Process Technologies (formerly Integrated Process Technologies), commented: “We are elated to acquire the rights to extend the LEWA EcoPrime chromatography platform and partner with ChromaCon to advance the use of continuous chromatography for the benefit of our customers.  EcoPrime LPLC is already an innovation leader in precision processing and batch-to-batch reproducibility, and the agreement will enable both our companies to further accelerate the development of advanced cost saving downstream processes for the biopharmaceutical manufacturing industry.”