Product News: Waters Introduces New Viridis Supercritical Fluid Chromatography Columns

Waters introduces Viridis™ SFC columns, a new family of analytical and preparative supercritical fluid chromatography (SFC) columns. Waters new Viridis SFC columns were developed to give laboratories using SFC a reliable source of high-quality columns for compound purification. Paired with Waters® SFC™ instrumentation laboratories now have a single source for both instrumentation and columns for their all-important purification work.

Representing the first of Waters column products for SFC, Viridis columns are available in two chemistries: 2-ethylpyridine and silica. Waters Viridis SFC Columns are manufactured by Waters ISO 9000 facilities under comprehensive quality guidelines and feature the company's patented preparative Optimum Bed Density (OBD™) technology, designed to produce mechanically stable columns with longer lifetimes.

Regarded as a "green" technology by many pharmaceutical laboratories, SFC is becoming the preferred approach for the isolation and purification of target compounds at the milligram to multi-gram scale.

SFC typically uses carbon dioxide (CO₂) as the main "supercritical" mobile phase. As a result, SFC separations are faster, require shorter re-equilibration times and offer higher throughput than those typically associated with conventional liquid chromatography.

As a chromatographic mobile phase, CO₂ is a low-cost solvent alternative to the organic solvents typically employed in the laboratory and is inert by nature and therefore safer to use. Using CO2, laboratories will typically experience a 70 – 95% reduction in solvent purchase and disposal costs over organic solvents.

Scientists at Pfizer have reported that SFC has resulted in increased productivity and throughput for its Structure Elucidation Group laboratories — notably a 50% reduction in the time needed to turn around the isolation portion of a structure elucidation project when compared to semi-preparative reversed-phase HPLC – which, in turn, has helped them expedite candidate decision making. With the introduction of Viridis columns, Waters now offers SFC and SFC/MS instrumentation and software for both analytical and preparative applications backed by Waters renowned service and support organizations.