Tecan and GE Healthcare collaborate for high throughput process development

• Expertise from two leading companies combine to bring increased quality, efficiency and reliability in the field of process development

• Combination of technologies substantially shortens time-to-clinic and reduces amount of required sample in process development

With recognized expertise in their respective fields of laboratory automation and protein purification, Tecan and GE Healthcare are working together to bring increased quality and efficiency to process development. The collaboration between the two leading suppliers focuses on high-throughput screening of protein purification conditions, using the winning combination of Tecan’s Freedom EVO® automated workstation with GE Healthcare’s PreDictor™ 96-well plates pre-filled with BioProcess™ chromatography media.

The throughput, precision and robustness of a Tecan automation platform ensures reproducible results from GE Healthcare’s 96-well process development technology, providing efficient miniaturized, parallel screening performed in a multivariate fashion with minimal cross-contamination. The combination of the technologies substantially shortens time spent on process development while allowing the investigation of a much larger experimental space, resulting in greater understanding of the process. The unique solution for the screening of process conditions provides process developers with quality, efficiency and reliability in downstream process development.

“With this collaboration, we have created a powerful solution for process development,” said Eric Willimann, Market Manager Protein Science, Tecan. “The combination of GE’s chemistry and Tecan’s hardware will provide our customers with a rapid and efficient method of screening process parameters, with minimal hands-on time.”

“Automated, parallel screening allows the process developer to quickly gain a greater overall understanding of the process,” said Catharina Hemström Nilsson, Market Program Manager, GE Healthcare. “Much more informed decisions can be made for process optimization, substantially shortening time-to-clinic. The data recorded are valuable from a regulatory perspective and help defining a robust manufacturing process.”

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For more information about GE Healthcare, please contact:

www.gelifesciences.com/bioprocess

About Tecan

Tecan (www.tecan.com) is a leading global supplier of laboratory instruments and solutions for the biopharma, forensic and diagnostic industries. The company specializes in the development, production and distribution of automation solutions for life science laboratories. Through its REMP subsidiary (www.remp.com), Tecan is the premier supplier of automated laboratory storage and logistics systems. Tecan's clients include pharmaceutical and biotech companies, university research departments, diagnostic laboratories and companies as well as forensics laboratories. Founded in Switzerland in 1980, the company has production, research and development sites in both North America and Europe and maintains a sales and service network in 52 countries. In 2007, Tecan achieved sales of CHF 414.4 million (USD 345.3 million; EUR 252.7 million). Registered shares of the Tecan Group are traded on the SWX Swiss Exchange (TK: TECN/Reuters: TECZn.S/Valor: 1210019).

About GE Healthcare

GE Healthcare provides transformational medical technologies and services that are shaping a new age of patient care. Our expertise in medical imaging and information technologies, medical diagnostics, patient monitoring systems, performance improvement, drug discovery, and biopharmaceutical manufacturing technologies is helping clinicians around the world re-imagine new ways to predict, diagnose, inform, treat and monitor disease, so patients can live their lives to the fullest.

GE Healthcare's broad range of products and services enable healthcare providers to better diagnose and treat cancer, heart disease, neurological diseases and other conditions earlier. Our vision for the future is to enable a new "early health" model of care focused on earlier diagnosis, pre-symptomatic disease detection and disease prevention. Headquartered in the United Kingdom, GE Healthcare is a $17 billion unit of General Electric Company (NYSE: GE). Worldwide, GE Healthcare employs more than 47,000 people committed to serving healthcare professionals and their patients in more than 100 countries. For more information about GE Healthcare, visit our website. www.gelifesciences.com/bioprocess