BAC and GE Healthcare Announce FVIII Purification Media Collaboration
01 April 2008
BAC BV, the Bio Affinity Company announced today that it has entered into a collaboration with GE Healthcare, a unit of General Electric Company
(NYSE: GE), to develop and market affinity chromatography media for the purification of therapeutic recombinant FVIII. BAC will provide its CaptureSelect™ affinity ligands, renowned for their high stability and specificity, to enable efficient process-scale purification of FVIII for the prevention and treatment of bleeding in patients with Haemophilia A.
CaptureSelect® ligands exploit the nature of Camelid single chain antibody fragments and offer enhanced stability and broad antigen-specific binding compared to traditional affinity ligands. These affinity ligands are manufactured using a high-yielding proprietary yeast-based expression system, which is completely animal-free. BAC can rapidly discover and develop CaptureSelect® ligands for chromatographic separations that can be customised for use in the manufacture of a range of biopharmaceuticals, including recombinant proteins, antibodies, antibody fragments and viruses.
“We are extremely pleased that GE Healthcare wishes to further develop and distribute our recombinant FVIII purification ligand products,” commented Laurens Sierkstra, CEO of BAC “This agreement endorses our technology and extends its accessibility to GE’s customers worldwide.”
ABOUT BAC
BAC BV – The Bio Affinity Company – offers a wide range of products and services for affinity purification
of biological materials from complex media. The Company’s proprietary CaptureSelect® affinity ligands,
based on Camelid single chain antibody fragments, have been proven to be suitable in a wide range of
biological applications including Life Science Research, Biomanufacturing and Healthcare.
CaptureSelect® ligand technology is based on selection of single chain antibody fragments with desirable chromatographic characteristics including robustness, high specificity and flexibility. Suitable ligands are cloned and expressed in high-titers through an animal-free Saccharomyces cerevisiae-based process that delivers a highly competitive cost of goods.
BAC BV was established in 1995 as a Unilever subsidiary. Currently the Company employs 28 people with an R&D laboratory facility in Vlaardingen and a state-of-the-art ISO 9001 certified manufacturing plant in Naarden, the Netherlands. For more information about BAC, please visit our websites.
