Discover DurA Cycle A50: New Affinity Protein A Resin for 2024

Aaron Moulin: First, Renato, could you tell us about Ecolab’s presence here at BIO 2024?

Renato Azevedo: BIO International is a fantastic platform for the biopharma space. It allows Ecolab Life Sciences to showcase its capabilities to a global audience and partner with our stakeholders, innovators, and customers. We’re here to connect with stakeholders and provide some really engaging talks. Finally, I can’t forget about this – we’re here to launch a new product, which we’re all very excited about.

AM: Exciting news from Renato – we are launching a new product. David, could you tell us more about this new product that we’re launching here?

David Cartmell: Happily, Aaron. First of all, I think the best place to start is the name. This is a new protein A resin called DurA Cycle. It’s another great piece of innovation and an example of Ecolab’s commitment to the industry and investing in our customer base to solve their problems.

Essentially, it adds to a rapidly growing affinity resin portfolio [from Purolite] on the back of fantastic launches such as Praesto Jetted A50 HipH and Praesto 70 CH1 resins, which we launched recently. It allows us to drive innovation in the downstream purification of antibodies.

Furthermore, this product caters to the biologics division, from small scale all the way through up to commercial scale. Speaking to our customers – which Purolite is super proud [of our commitment] to listening and engaging with our customers and solving those needs – most, if not all, customers are looking to reduce their costs. The overall cost of goods, driving that through high performance, [providing] value with extended resin lifetime – DurA really offers that extended resin lifetime for a lower price.

One of the examples that we’ve done this is looking at leakage. Ligand leakage is when ligand comes off through eluate, and that has detrimental effects on the resin lifetime. DurA addresses [resin lifetime] with lower ligand leakage to give you the maximum amount of time and efficiency through your resin designing strategies.

AM: Thank you for all of that, David. I know at Purolite we’re very excited about this launch. I’m sure our customers are too. Can you tell us a little bit more about some of the unique market challenges that you think DurA Cycle is positioned to address?

DC: Absolutely. As I mentioned, the whole industry is looking to reduce their costs. But the main drivers for them – outside of costs – are ensuring they have excellent performance and high quality.

DurA offers performance really on the top end of the scale and allows excellent capacities, and high pH, and protein leakage. But overall, this increases the productivity for our customers, giving them better value.
 
Furthermore, dare I say, during the pandemic, there were massive concerns over security supply and delays to clinical practices. So, what we’re looking to do at Purolite is enable customers to adopt something called dual sourcing.

[Dual sourcing] is essentially when [customers] can interchange and use different types of resins for different clinical trials or the same clinical trial. This will give the customers an excellent security supply to ensure that they will not have to experience long lead times. Delays to really important clinical trials have a massive effect all the way up to the end patient and these end users.

AM: Well, thank you for all that, David. That was some really great insight there.

So, nothing in this world happens in a vacuum. That’s certainly true about us here at Ecolab. We’re a very collaborative company, be that with our customers or with our partners, and one of those partners is Repligen. I’m hoping, Renato, you can tell us a little bit about that unique partnership and the benefits that it offers to us and to our customers?

RA: Sure. So, to me, it’s all about solving customer problems and customer challenges. We take the best of both technologies – where Repligen has a fantastic portfolio of ligands and technologies around that, and we’ve got our jetting base bead technology. Combining the two and bringing that value-add to our customers really gives them a choice in the market.

All of this is being backed with some great technical support. We have field application scientists throughout the world, we have a new lab being built in King of Prussia as a collaboration center for our customers, [and we offer extensive] regulatory support. We have a lot of experts in the field and are happy to help our customers through that process.

AM: Great. Well, first I want to thank you, David and Renato, so much for taking the time to speak to us. Head to our product showcase to learn more about DurA Cycle.