Cambridge facility to become worldwide hub for SAFC's chiral service

Sigma-Aldrich Corporation (NASDAQ: SIAL) today announced that its custom manufacturing and services business unit, SAFC® (www.safcglobal.com), will consolidate its global chiral chromatography screening and small scale purification operations and locate them at its Pharmorphix® Solid State Research Laboratories in Cambridge, UK, to support its new integrated chiral chemistry offer.  The Cambridge facility will now become the worldwide hub for SAFC's chiral service offering which ranges from Chiral Gas Chromatography (GC) and Liquid Chromatography (LC) Separations, to large scale crystallization, Simulated Moving Bed (SMB) Separations and production of enantiomerically pure Active Pharmaceutical Ingredients (APIs).  The consolidation of SAFC's chiral services will provide customers with a single, dedicated point of contact from the development stage through scale up. Paul Rodwell, a former Senior Principal Scientist with Pfizer, has been appointed to lead SAFC's chiral chromatography method development team.

Analytical equipment is currently being installed at the Cambridge site, having been transferred from Sigma-Aldrich subsidiary Supelco Analytical in Bellefonte, PA, where the chiral screening service was previously performed. The chiral screening operation will continue to support the analytical chiral column business and will draw upon Supelco's analytical expertise to complement the solid-form characterization and research services already located at the Cambridge site. The new laboratories are expected to be validated and fully operational in July 2012.

"SAFC offers a robust, cohesive range of chiral services that are applicable for a wide range of markets, from early stage drug discovery to route optimization and product development, through gram to multi kilo scale-up," Rodwell commented.

The SAFC chiral offering already includes separation by commercial-scale SMB chromatography, chiral preparative HPLC, separation by crystallization of diastereomeric salts and determination of the absolute stereochemistry by single crystal X-Ray diffraction. SAFC Chiral Services, combined with Supelco and Aldrich products for chiral chromatography and chemical synthesis, give Sigma-Aldrich a wide portfolio of capabilities and services to support Pharmaceutical, Agrochemical, Fine Chemicals and Food and Fragrances companies from early research to final production of high quality enantiomerically pure compounds.

SOURCE Sigma-Aldrich Corporation