Silica particles for chromotography.

Nanologica AB  has entered into a service agreement with global contract development and manufacturing organisation (CDMO) Sterling Pharma Solutions for the large-scale production of silica particles.

The partnership is the latest step in the development of a new business venture for Nanologica, which specialises in the development and manufacture of silica for application in drug delivery and chromatography.

Using Nanologica's technology,  Sterling Pharma Solutions will produce the large volumes of NLAB Saga™ chromatography material needed to perform preparative chromatography.

Andreas Bhagwani, CEO of Nanologica said:  "Sterling has 50 years of experience in cGMP manufacturing for the pharmaceutical industry and a very strong process knowledge. This new partnership will allow us to scale production to completely different volumes than what is possible from our own site in Södertälje, Sweden. In practice, this means that our capacity increases from tens of kilograms to tens of tonnes.”

Nanologica announced in February 2018 that it will start manufacturing preparatory chromatography media. Preparative chromatography is used in pharmaceutical manufacturing to "purify" peptides, specifically insulin. Vastly greater amounts of silica are used in preparative chromatography than in analytical chromatography, where Nanologica is active today.

Andreas continued: “We can now engage in detailed negotiations with two potential customers regarding our preparative chromatography offering. The goal is to finalise long-term supply agreements that will provide us with profitability relatively quickly.”

Kevin Cook, CEO of Sterling Pharma Solutions said: “Sterling is delighted to be working with Nanologica on this exciting and innovative opportunity. Sterling has rich experience in the development and scale-up of complex synthesis in a fully cGMP environment. The combination of the Nanolologica expertise and technology, together with Sterling’s manufacturing capabilities, provides the required combination for successful commercialisation.”

@nanologica @sterling_pharma #Pharma @ramarketingpr 

Industrial networking for automation

Silica is appearing at this year’s Embedded World fair in Nuremberg (March 2nd – 4th, 2010) entirely under the banner of “Networking for automation systems”.

There will be a live demonstration of controlling a high-stack shelving system based on EtherCAT (Ethernet for Control Automation Technology) standards. The high-stack shelving system is used as an example to show how many things industrial Ethernet can do.

The system was designed, built and programmed entirely by SILICA’s applications engineers. All the specialists involved in developing it will be on hand and available to visitors for first-hand information throughout the fair.

The system is controlled via a process control system running as software under Microsoft’s Windows Embedded Standard on an Intel® Atom™ platform which serves both as EtherCAT master and industrial PC. The model’s sensors and actuators are interfaced via a slave module, demonstrating how the EtherCAT standard is realised with an FPGA core on a Xilinx FPGA.
Galvanically separated interfaces linking the 3.3 V and 24 V domains use Infineon and STMicroelectronics modules.

Both the high-stack shelving system’s input and output stations have RFID readers implemented with NFC chips by NXP and barcode readers which analyse camera signals using a Renesas microcontroller. Readout data is sent to the PLC in the industrial PC and processed there. A live image of the demo is sent from a CCTV camera using a Blackfin processor by Analog Devices.

SILICA’s appearance at the fair reflects its total solutions and technical support strategy: its own application developed in-house enables specialists to deal with typical problems and the complex applications involved directly.

SILICA is at Halle 12, Stand 241, and is also represented as co-exhibitor on Microsoft’s Stand 11-318.