Mar 1 2018
Can you tell us about RotaChrom Technologies and why you are at Pittcon 2018?
RotaChrom Technologies is the first company to invent a truly industrial scale applications for the centrifugal partition chromatography technique. This is a technique that does not use any liquid and that does not use any solid bulk material such as normal or reverse phase silica.
In fact, it only uses liquid solvents as both its mobile and stationary phases. We are here at Pittcon because this is a very credible and reputable show, with incredibly smart folks, and we are here to meet, mingle, sell and partner. The reason any company would come to a reputable conference like this!
Can you tell us about the products you are exhibiting this year?
Rotachrom has two products. It has the rCPC instrument and the iCPC instrument. For the rCPC; the 'R' stands for research. That is our pilot scale CPC instrument. The instrument does between one and five kilograms a month.
Our industrial scale instrument (that is the iCPC) the 'I' stands for industrial. That is capable of tens to hundreds of kilos a month depending on the purification project. We work primarily in active pharmaceutical ingredient purification and molecular isolation.
Can you tell us about the benefits about the two products?
There are three major advantages of CPC compared to silica-based techniques. The first is its cost effectiveness. Both the mobile and stationary phases are liquids solvents, making it significantly more cost effective than silica based techniques. Also, both solvents are recyclable, meaning that a user canreuse both mobile and stationary phases.
Both phases are >95% recyclable making it by far the most cost effective chromatographic technique currently available. With silica based techniques, you have to dedicate a single column to a single purification project, and you can use a column maybe 50 to 100 times before you have to throw it away. The operating costs are remarkably less using the CPC technique.
The second major advantage is its adaptability. Using the same infrastructure, I could do multiple projects, maybe even in the same day. Since both phases are liquids, I could purge the system with a cleaning solvent, meaning that I could then use that same infrastructure for a completely different purification technique, and that is a huge deal. This makes it one of the most robust chromatography techniques period.
Third and most importantly, the biggest deal is its scalability. The CPC technique is directly scalable. Anything I achieve on the milligram scale or the gram scale, I could then scale to the industrial scale/the kilogram scale within a matter of weeks. That makes the technique inherently predictable. Creating completely scalable methods allows a company to show proof of concept to investors and customers before making an investment into the iCPC platform.
What industries and applications are going to see the biggest benefit from your two products?
The core industries that we work with are high value active pharmaceutical ingredients and big pharma. We have a lot of interest working with Contract Manufacturing Organizations because of course, they work at a very large scale, purifying tons per month, and operating costs are a major consideration.
We have actually got a lot of interest from the industrial hemp and cannabis space, but we are very selective about which companies we work with, we want to make sure they are highly professional and reputable firms that know what they are doing.