W. R. Grace & Co. has affirmed its commitment to three growing service lines for the pharmaceutical and nutraceutical industries and announced agreements to sell product lines associated with its chromatography instruments, columns, and related laboratory products businesses that are not aligned with the company's plans for growth.

Grace will continue to supply Vydcac and Davisil media for process chromatography, Syloid FP excipients for drug formulations, and custom manufacturing of regulatory starting materials and intermediates.

Grace has agreed to sell its flash chromatography and evaporative light scattering detector (ELSD) instrument business to BUCHI Corporation, a division of BUCHI Labortechnik AG, a Swiss manufacturer and global supplier of laboratory equipment to the pharma, chemicals, and food/beverage industries. The sale includes Reveleris Purification Systems, GraceResolv and Reveleris Flash Cartridges, and Alltech ELSD 3300 instrumentation. Grace is now the exclusive supplier of media for use in these flash cartridge brands by BUCHI.

Dr. Maisch GmbH, a German company specializing in high-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC), has agreed to purchase Grace's line of analytical HPLC columns, preparative columns, and packing equipment and services. This includes Exsil, Modsil, and Exmere Media, the Alltech HPLC column brands Adsorbosphere, Allsphere, Brava, Econosphere, GracesMartin, Platinum, and VisionNHT brands. Grace will continue to supply media and provide media bonding services for these column brands. Also included in the purchase are the MODcol brands, including Spring Preparative Column Hardware, Multipacker packing equipment and packing services.

Additional Grace HPLC column brands, including Vydac will be sold exclusively by Hichrom Ltd. of the UK, a manufacturer and distributor of HPLC and ultra high performance liquid chromatography (UHPLC) columns and accessories. In addition to selling Vydac analytical columns, Hichrom will acquire Grace's Alltima, AllSep Apex, Apollo, Genesis, and Prevail HPLC column brands. Grace will continue to supply media to Hichrom for these column brands.

Grace also has agreed to sell its Grace and Alltech solid phase extraction (SPE) cartridge brands Maxi-Clean, Extract-Clean, and Gracepure brands to S*Pure Pte Ltd, a laboratory and scientific equipment supplier based in Singapore. The related Grace manufacturing facility in Surat, India is included in the transaction. Grace will continue to supply SPE media to S*Pure.

Grace will no longer accept orders for any of the product lines it has sold. All future inquiries for these brands should be directed to the purchasing companies.

Source: W.R. Grace