My name is Andy Davies and I work at Prometic Biosciences as Sales & Marketing Director.

One issue I always hear that is of concern to many process development scientists is the limited time to available to develop purification processes. This often restricts their choice of chromatography resins to those they’ve used before or are readily available in the hope that they will give the selectivity required and provide the final purity needed when used in combination with several other resins. However, this can lead to sub-optimal separation and multi-step processes which in turn make for a less cost effective process.

Equally it’s apparent that the purification challenges are becoming more complex and the need to higher selectivity and capacity ever increase.

At ProMetic Biosciences Ltd (PBL) we have been pioneering design, development and manufacture of affinity purification technology for lab-scale and industrial-scale bioprocessing since 1987 and now have over 20 years’ experience in the development of affinity products and design of new custom adsorbents.

We offer an extensive range of off-the-shelf Bioseparation products for the recovery and purification of biologicals as well as purification services including bespoke custom designed chromatography adsorbents, process development and in silico modelling applications.

We understand that early stage application of affinity chromatography in downstream processing is very advantageous with the potential to increase yields and reduce the overall cost of goods. While protein engineering technologies are producing increasingly diverse therapeutic proteins – whole molecules, fragments, fusion proteins – advances in bioprocess development are enabling their production at industrial scale. Along with these developments is an increase in the demand for sufficiently robust synthetic affinity ligands with appropriate protein binding selectivites as primary capture affinity adsorbents.

In the absence of suitable existing ligands, the development of completely new ligands has analogies with the development of novel drug compounds and the computational techniques used in the search for novel drug compounds have been adapted and used by ProMetic to inform a number of stages in the affinity ligand design process, and to gain an understanding of both the target protein and adsorbent interactions.

We have extensive knowledge of in silico modelling techniques, successfully applying its bioinformatics modelling suite to identify lead candidate adsorbents in a variety of projects. We can provide you with a range of services, from virtual screening, to the application of in silico techniques within a custom ligand discovery program:

• Screening of virtual ligand libraries.
• Diverse or focused ligand selection from virtual ‘chemical space’ (Chemical Combinatorial Library CCL® ~100,000 triazine based ligands).
• Evaluating potential binding sites using structural/functional importance and blind docking ‘roaming’ of ligands to target protein (using crystallographic information).
• Screening designed combinatorial libraries to further explore surrounding chemical space of lead screening hits.
• Investigating the effects of support, spacer arm and surface chemistry on binding interactions by molecular dynamic modelling.

 The Webinar on May 20^th will provide details of how ligand design is approached and show examples of successful development programmes leading to FDA approved biological drugs.

High process parameters have direct influence on the efficiency of a power plant.  On one hand this can be realized by new boiler technologies and the development of new materials.  On the other hand boiler designers face constrains when the temperature exceeds certain values of around more than 600°C. E.g. due to hot steam corrosion, in this temperature range only high alloyed steels could be used – up till now. With the new VM12 SHC (super high corrosion resistant) those colleagues have a new option to consider. To be honest, I am proud that our team of R&D specialist and technical customer service passed all faced obstacles and finalized the work with the successful approval of TÜV and ASME recently. It is the first time that an martensitic steel grade is able to resist corrosion in such harsh environments. In the webinar I will explain more in details the results we gained in our long lasting testing series.

What are the first replies of customers, who already have been using the new grade?
Of huge importance for the success of a grade are mainly the following aspects:

• Handling of the grade.
  This means is the client able to use the grade with state of the art and existing technologies in terms of welding and forming technologies.
  Clear answer from the market: YES
• Does the grade meet the expectations on long term ( mechanical properties)
  Long term testing is a fundamental criteria for material developments in order to be able to estimate life time of a component inside a boiler made of those steel grades. The more complex the materials get, in terms of alloying morphology, the more essential it is to have a clear understanding and view on: What happens with the grade after several thousand hours of processing?
  Also on this the feedback is absolutely positive.
• Some of them uses the grade in combined cycle power plants. And this was done to our surprise, because at the beginning of our development we did not had this option in the specification sheet when we started with our development.But Siemens used it in their combined cycle plant in Irsching (Germany) and ordered tubes for the follow up project in our home town Düsseldorf. We are eager to find out where design engineers find applications where VM12 SHC can prove its strength. This would be one of the topics I would like to discuss with the audience in our webinar.

What else do you have in the pipeline? Which developments can we expect in future?
Vallourec is known as the key player in seamless tubes and pipes for power generation and you can be confident that VM12 SHC is not the end of the line and other developments will follow. Recently we invested Millions of Euro in our new Vallourec Research Centre Germany, dedicated to the R&D of boiler tubes and line pipes. Unfortunately the development of steel grades needs time – a lot of time to conduct all necessary discussion with the clients, make the specification, testing and pass the international standards. Be sure more will follow, but recently our target is to inform the experts about the new opportunity VM12 SHC, the power of choice in Power Generation.

If you want a preliminary information, the link to our VM12 SHC movie on our youtube channel is recommended or you can visit our website and order the VM12 SHC Technical-Data Sheet

Hear more from Mahmud Jarrar, Director Technical Customer Service, Steam Tubes & Pipes, from Vallourec at their webinar on the 13th May at 4pm London/11am New York. Mahmud will be discussing ‘The Power of Choice: Steel for Super High Corrosion Environments‘.

There are some people who know a lot about a little.

There are those who know a little about a lot.

Then there are the few who know pretty much about everything there is to know across a huge range of market verticals and how they relate to scientific domains… and it’s this you need if you are in any way involved in the fast changing world of research and development (R&D).

It is, after all, estimated that more than 70% of software systems will be SaaS based or hosted – or both – within five years.

That means radical change to the way you operate is already here, or will be soon, whatever domain you work in. And while this will dramatically affect the way you manage, deploy and purchase systems, the gains for your organization and vital initiatives, such as collaboration, are undeniable.

That’s where our extensive R&D scientific and business domain knowledge comes into its own. Not only does it give us an insight into the unique challenges faced by a whole raft of market verticals, but it also reveals the common issues we all face, to deliver solutions that work in the context of your R&D organization.

All organizations collaborate internally and externally these days. It’s a dynamic and often unpredictable process. So the infrastructure that supports your R&D collaborations has to be just as dynamic, as well as easy to deliver to collaborators around the world, across multiple industries including commercial, not-for-profits and academia. Now that really calls out for in-depth domain understanding!

So, given that everyone is heading towards web-based deployment models for software, it’s going to have to be easy to use and intuitive – to the point where ‘user training’ is an obsolete term.

If you’d like to find out how we deliver that kind of transformational impact to all kinds of R&D organizations, join me for my latest webinar: ‘Collaboration & Innovation in R&D Informatics’; and discover how our multi-domain expertise can provide the right R&D collaboration solution for you.

Dr Paul Denny-Gouldson, Vice President Solution Strategy, IDBS

To find out more about Paul’s upcoming webinar click here.