The company, recently formed by combination of the former Amersham and GE Medical Systems, noted that the system combines the high-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) hardware expertise of GE, marketed under the BioProcess brand, with the Kromasil media developed by Akzo Nobel subsidiary Eka Chemicals.

This combination of columns and media is claimed to optimise the purification of biopharmaceuticals, synthetic peptides, synthetic oligonucleotides and small organic molecules which will "lead to verified and documented procedures to meet the exacting performance demands of reversed phase chromatography (RPC) applications,"according to the GE.

A spokesman for the company said that cost-savings would come from a number of areas, including improvements in column packing.

"By combining GE Healthcare's strength in HPLC column technology with those of Kromasil in RPC media, customers purifying peptides and proteins at large scale will have access to a complete solution," commented Mats Grahn, vice president of protein separations product management at the company .