Waters and Genovis Enter Biopharmaceutical Partnership

Waters Corporation and Genovis AB are collaborating to develop and market complete routine biopharmaceutical characterization workflows based on the Waters BioAccord LC-MS System, Andrew+ pipetting robot and Genovis SmartEnzymes. The goal of the collaboration is to develop automated workflows for the rapid and consistent characterization of critical quality attributes (CQAs) of monoclonal antibodies (mAbs) and other protein-based drugs in bioprocess development, formulation, stability testing and quality control (QC).

“Biologics analysis is an area that is ripe for improvement. What takes analytical scientists several days to do, should take hours or minutes instead,” said Jeff Mazzeo, vice president, global marketing and scientific operations, Waters Corporation. “Today, up-front sample preparation is a major bottleneck to productivity, largely due to the number of manual steps involved and the outmoded technology by which samples are readied for analysis. By combining Genovis’ SmartEnzymes with automation, liquid chromatography/time-of-flight mass spectrometry and application-specific software workflows from Waters, we intend to move biotherapeutic analysis forward in ways never thought possible.”

Fredrik Olsson, CEO, Genovis AB, said, “The BioAccord LC-MS system and the Andrew+ pipetting robot align perfectly with our strategies and vision at Genovis to bring simplified, robust and automated enzyme-driven workflows to the biopharma industry. The enzymatic workflows that we will develop in collaboration with Waters will help our customers in their efforts to bring safe and novel therapeutics to patients, faster.”

The workflows in development are based on the pairing of the Waters BioAccord LC-MS System, Andrew+ pipetting robot and Genovis SmartEnzymes and will focus on addressing the application needs of GxP laboratories in the following areas: Product variant analysis (e.g. glycosylation, oxidation); bioprocess stability monitoring; and biosimilar glycosylation analysis.