Avecia expands Aptamers and siRNA capabilities

Published: 18-May-2007

Avecia OligoMedicines is expanding its Milford manufacturing facility to enhance its siRNA and Aptamer manufacturing. The new equipment and facilities will be fully on line by 1 September 2007.


Avecia OligoMedicines is expanding its Milford manufacturing facility to enhance its siRNA and Aptamer manufacturing. The new equipment and facilities will be fully on line by 1 September 2007.

The upgrade of the Milford, Massachusetts facility is in three key areas: Cleavage/Deprotection, Chromatography and Duplexation/Conjugation. The chemistry deployed for RNA cleavage and deprotection is more complex and hazardous than that used for DNA manufacture. Avecia has installed new large-scale cleavage deprotection vessels and equipment to enable large scale siRNA manufacture in batch sizes of 75-100mmol.

The facility upgrade includes the addition of two new chromatography skids and associated equipment, enabling High Pressure/High Temperature purification over the scale range from 1-150mmol. This purification equipment will be fully compatible with organic rich solvent streams, which will enable Avecia to extend their offering of downstream processing options to include organic rich IEX (Ion Exchange Chromatography) and RP (Reverse Phase Chromatography).

The company has also installed new duplexation/annealing vessels to enable controlled siRNA duplexation in batch sizes up to 150mmol. Additionally, large scale conjugation/pegylation capacity has been installed covering the range up to 100mmol.

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