Officials at GE Healthcare say the company has completed the acquisition of Puridify, a bioprocessing UK startup that is developing a nanofiber-based platform purification technology for biopharmaceutical production. Puridify’s technology, FibroSelect, is complementary to the bead resins and chromatography membranes used today in downstream bioprocessing—promising faster mass transfer, scalability, and ease of use, according to Jan Makela, general manager, bioprocess, GE Healthcare Life Sciences.
“GE is making an early stage technology investment by buying Puridify’s platform. The technology consists of a nanofiber-based material to which ligands are attached to activate the platform for purification. For example, Protein A is used as ligand in the capture step of monoclonal antibodies, but other ligands may be used depending on the application needs,” Makela tells GEN.
The platform is expected to bring productivity improvements in the process development (PD) phase and small-scale manufacturing for a wide variety of biopharmaceutical applications. GE Healthcare will invest further to bring Puridify’s platform to commercialization fully integrating it within the broad range of bioprocess purification products already available at GE.
“This may include common ligands to simplify process scaleup, for example, or common hardware architectures to enable FlexFactory system integration. We will be investing further in Puridify’s early stage platform to bring it to full commercialization, working with the Puridify team as they transition to GE,” continues Makela. ”Our strategy is to make the whole biopharmaceutical manufacturing process more efficient for our customers, and we are open to look at different technical solutions in this space both in upstream and downstream. This investment shows that GE continues to re-invest, to drive market-leading innovation around the capture and purification process steps.”
GE will acquire Puridify and all 17 employees will join GE Healthcare Life Sciences’ bioprocess business. The Puridify team will remain at their current location in Stevenage, UK, which will serve as a small research hub for bioprocess. Since it was founded in 2014 and after winning the first OneStart competition, Puridify has been privately funded by leading venture capital investors Touchstone Innovations and SR One, with additional support from University College London (UCL) Business.
