Purification specialist BIA Separations to become part of Sartorius

BIA Separations will be Sartorius's center of excellence for purification of cell and gene therapeutics.

BIA Separations develops and manufactures market-leading products for purification and analysis of large biomolecules, such as viruses, plasmids and mRNA, which are used in cell and gene therapies and other advanced therapies.

The company's technology for manufacturing scale purification is already in use to produce the first commercialized advanced therapeutics. The company also has a strong presence with such novel drug candidates in the clinical pipeline.

"Combining the teams and technologies of Sartorius and BIA will create a premium offering for the manufacturing of advanced therapies," commented Joachim Kreuzburg, CEO of Sartorius.

Founded in 1998, BIA Separations has invented and commercialized the unique CIM (Convective Interaction Media) monolith chromatography technology. In addition, it offers analytical technologies for process monitoring and optimization.

At its headquarters in Ajdovščina, Slovenia, BIA employs a workforce of some 120 people. Following its strong growth, the company is currently more than quadrupling its production capacity, which will become operational during the beginning of 2021. Furthermore, the company is significantly expanding its market-leading process development services.

Aleš Strancar, founder and CEO of BIA Separations, commented: "I am especially excited that our combined R&D groups will result in one of the strongest development teams in bioprocessing worldwide, which will rapidly increase the number of products under development while substantially reducing time-to-market."

Expecting continued very strong double-digit sales growth over the next few years, BIA is forecasted to earn sales revenue of approximately 25 million euro in 2020.