Amersham Biosciences Introduces Kvick Cassettes for High Performance Ultrafiltration.

Business Editors

PISCATAWAY, N.J.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--April 28, 2003

Amersham Biosciences, the life sciences business of Amersham plc (LSE:, NYSE:, OSE: AHM), has today announced a new range of ultrafiltration cassettes. New Kvick(TM) cassettes help to speed up bioprocessing timelines by offering an easy way to separate, concentrate and diafilter biological solutions. The Kvick range consists of both hardware and disposable cassettes in several configurations.

Kvick cassettes consist of superior macrovoid-free membranes arranged in flat sheets, offering high product recoveries and excellent yields. The silicone construction and 'anti-dead space' design eliminates corner space areas, removing places where impurities can hide in the cleaning process. All cassettes feature a built-in gasket, which reduces the risk of contamination and the need to stock and replace gaskets. Kvick cassettes offer high flux rates and their three-component construction from PES, polypropylene and silicone ensures low extractables. The void-free structure of the cassette membranes provides sharp rejection curves, thereby ensuring high product yields.

The Kvick system is easy to scale-up, enabling researchers to go from the laboratory benchtop to pilot and process environments easily. Scale-up is linear, from mls to litres to m3.

Presently cassettes are available in the most used ulltrafiltration configurations. Five different membrane nominal molecular weight cutoffs are available, down to a molecular weight of 10 kDa. In addition, three cassette sizes are available, offering a nominal membrane effective area from 0.1 m2 to 2.32 m2. All Kvick products are supported by Amersham Biosciences global customer services.

Mike Estabrook, membrane separations marketing manager at Amersham Biosciences commented: "There has been increasing demand from customers for significant improvements in membrane separations products that will help them meet the ever-increasing pace of today's pharmaceutical bioprocessing. Amersham Biosciences meets this need by offering Kvick Cross Flow Filtration products and technology for fast and precise results in an easy-to-use format. To ensure quality, all cassettes are 100 per cent integrity tested prior to shipping."

Amersham Biosciences membrane separations technology is currently in use in the purification of monoclonal antibodies, plasma factors, recombinant proteins and vaccines.

Amersham Biosciences, the life sciences business of Amersham plc (LSE: NYSE: OSE: AHM), is a world leader in developing and providing integrated systems and solutions for disease research, drug development and manufacture. Our systems are used to uncover the function of genes and proteins, for the discovery and development of drugs and for the manufacture of biopharmaceuticals. The customers for Amersham Biosciences' products and technology are pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies and research and academic institutions, principally in North America, Europe, Latin America and Asia.