3M aims to clean up with updated purifier product

The company announced the updated product at the beginning of the conference and subsequently spoke to us about its development and what the update will bring.

The product itself is designed for use in downstream capture and polishing to reducing cell debris.

The purifier is able to remove soluble and insoluble impurities, such as DNA and HCP, through its combined use of polymer materials, fine fibre nonwoven, and asymmetric membranes.

Karen Albertson, global business unit director, 3M Separation & Purification Sciences, told us at Biotech Week Boston how the new product represents a step forward: “This is a step change, what it can do is different. When people say, ‘Oh, Emphaze – that’s just a new depth filtration’. That’s not true. It has a foot in clarification and a foot in chromatography. You have charged grabbing of DNA and HCP, and then it’s got a size exclusion membrane so that once you go through the protein A part coming down then you can look at consolidating steps.”​

In person and in the press release, 3M emphasised that the product had been developed through collaboration and consultation with customers.

Mark Gehlsen, global technical director, 3M Separation & Purification Sciences, explained: “Our customers have to be able to use this in a very easy way. You can’t just give customers a cartridge or piece of media and say: ‘Here you go’. We are really building a capability for delivering hardware and systems”.​

He continued to explain that 3M works directly with its customer to understand requirements by sending its own engineers to set up mobile laboratories, working on the filtration train, and will work with customers for one or two days at a time.

He concluded, “At the end of that time, the customer is going to do testing on the filtered solution to see how well you did because they have other people who could offer similar services.”​