Waters has now developed the Viridis SFC columns, a new family of analytical and preparative supercritical fluid chromatography (SFC) columns.

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.