Merck and Knauer cooperate in chromatography business / Systems providers for preparative chromatography - one-stop shopping for instruments, chemicals and know

Darmstadt/Munich (PROTEXT) - Merck KGaA will extend is productand service offering in the field of preparative chromatographyand, with immediate effect, will globally co-market thechromatography instruments and services of Dr.-Ing. HerbertKnauer GmbH, Berlin. Through the cooperation, from whichprimarily customers in the life sciences industry will profit,Merck becomes a systems provider for preparative chromatography.The agreement has now been presented on the occasion of theinternational laboratory trade fair Analytica in Munich. Both partners contribute their core competencies to thecooperation: Merck has almost a century's unique know-how oftechnical applications in the field of chromatography and is atthe same time market leader in the manufacture of the necessarysolvents and separation columns. Knauer is one of the leadingmanufacturers of scientific instruments for chromatography. Bothpartners will use Merck's laboratory distribution network fortheir world-wide marketing, which comprises the companies MerckEurolab and VWR Scientific Products and leads the global marketin this segment. This represents the first one-stop shopping forthe entire process chain in the field of preparativechromatography including sales and marketing. "With this step we offer our customers the opportunity of one-stop shopping for instruments, chemicals and know-how and thus ofsaving time and development costs", says Bernd Reckmann, head ofthe Scientific Laboratory Products division at Merck. Chromatography is a process for the separation of substancemixtures. It is an indispensable link between the search foractive ingredients and industrial production. Life sciencescompanies, in particular, face the present-day challenge ofintroducing new active ingredients onto the market in evershorter spaces of time. This has led to dramatic changes inorganic chemical synthesis and to the use of fully automatedsystems for activity tests. With the aid of parallel synthesis incombinatorial chemistry and high-throughput screening in activitytests it is possible to produce a multitude of arbitrary orqualified target substances in the search for new activeingredients. Chromatography plays a key role in this, for it isused both in the analysis of the tiniest quantities of substancesand in the manufacture of the new active ingredients on atechnical scale. Here, for instance, it can help to identify thechallenges in upscaling from laboratory to production scale at anearly stage and thus save substantial time and development costsbeforehand. With its Pharmaceuticals, Laboratory and Specialty Chemicalsbusiness sectors, the Merck Group achieved sales of EUR 5.3billion last year. The Laboratory business sector, where Merck isglobal leader in the manufacture of high-purity reagents andscientific laboratory products, generated sales of EUR 1.6billion in 1999. In the Laboratory Reagents division, to whichthe chromatography business belongs, sales rose by 11 percent toEUR 278 million. ots Original Text Service: Merck KGaA Internet:http://recherche.newsaktuell.de Contact: Barbara Bennier Tel.+49 6151 72 2579 Fax +49 6151 72 7707 E-mailbarbara.bennier@merck.de E-mail: pressestelle@merck.de Internethttp ://www.merck.de

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