This, of course, is always one of the first questions an organic, medicinal, or peptide chemist has when starting the research process for a flash chromatography system. Here at Biotage, we receive this question hundreds and hundreds of times a year, likely within the first couple of minutes of any conversation.

Sfär Stands for Spherical, Biotage® Stands for Quality 

Biotage developed and introduced pre-packed columns for flash purification in 1994. Today our broad selection of columns enables professionals to choose the solution which best suits their purification needs.

Sfär is the Swedish word for "sphere", and the name of our columns reflects the fact that we have made spherical silica a standard due to its higher surface area and higher loading capacity. Reliable and flexible, Biotage® Sfär columns deliver larger loading capacities, tighter elution bands and purer fractions than traditional flash columns.
Biotage® Sfär is a complete portfolio of flash columns, available in a large variety of sizes from 5g to 350 g and in a range of media types, so you can purify milligrams to multi-grams of your valuable compounds quickly and easily.

First, join me on a flashback to my past as a discovery chemist just fresh out of grad school and eager to make a difference in pharmaceutical research. I was advised by my boss to model my behavior after a colleague and labmate with a reputation of being highly productive and successful. I was also informed that ‘chemist productivity’ was measured by 1) the number of compounds (of sufficient quantity and quality) he/she registered in the company’s database and 2) meeting project milestones.

Chemistry, by its very nature, involves the use of chemicals that can be harmful, toxic and potentially damaging to the environment, which means that drug discovery currently has a large and expensive environmental footprint. However, all is not lost. With a few small steps it is possible to make a big change to the impact that drug discovery has on our world. Let’s look at ways we can reduce the environmental impact of chemical processing and flash chromatography. This involves using green chemistry applications in the purification workflow to find a solution that reduces chemical waste to make it good for both the chemist and the environment.

Chromatographic purification methods such as flash chromatography can have a high environmental impact since they typically involve large quantities of harmful or toxic solvents run at high flow rates. In many laboratories the cost of procuring and then disposing of these solvents can be a major part of the overall cost of projects. For the chemist, trying to reduce the environmental impact of small molecule synthesis is part of being a good global citizen. Here are three strategies that greatly reduce the environmental impact of flash purifications. It can also save money in the long run by reducing the cost of chemical waste disposal.