Our cutting-edge chromatography systems are essential instruments for advanced research tasks. But for many start-ups, universities and institutes, purchasing them is beyond their financial reach. This doesn’t necessarily have to be the case.
Over the last decade we have been refurbishing and remanufacturing ÄKTA platform and bioanalytic instruments to make them more affordable or to equip them for donations through Seeding Labs. Cytiva has a team of seven working to remanufacture instruments that have been traded back or donated. They make them fit for purpose and then offer to re-sell them, with a guarantee, to customers.
Åke Andersson, who leads the remanufacturing team located in Umeå in Northern Sweden, underlines how demand for refurbished equipment is steadily growing: “We investigate, repair and resell -- it’s a nice interface. In 2020 we refurbished 120 units, ten years ago, we did 30. And today, we’re at 1,000 instruments!”
The 1000th instrument was shipped to the UK start-up DJS Antibodies. Their CEO David Llewellyn says: “We have chosen a refurbished instrument primarily for cost reason but we’re also glad to be re-using an instrument for sustainability reasons. The instrument will be a workhorse in the purification and analysis of our antibodies, ultimately helping us accelerate the development of our novel treatments for patients with inflammatory diseases.”
As good as new
The team has a strong commitment to help others and deep knowledge of our instruments. They play an important role in investigating failing instruments through root cause analysis and provide feedback on product performance to our innovation team.
This is a good possibility for organizations that otherwise not could have afforded to buy a new instrument to acquire important equipment at a lower cost.
Cristina Peixoto from IBET in Portugal says: “The first ÄKTA came to our bioproduction unit in 1990. Some years later in 2003 we had the ÄKTA Explorer which is still working today. Nowadays we can afford the Äkta Avant but without the possibility to buy a refurbished instrument we couldn’t have afforded to start and to move. So it was really important.”
Developing circular business models is an important part of integrating sustainability throughout Cytiva, and refurbishing equipment is not only a way to offer some customers affordable equipment, it extends the product life cycle of our products too.
Watch a video with our customer Cristina Peixoto from IBET here.