Antibiotics

Antibiotics form the most important group of drugs in the fight against infectious diseases. Representing around 13 percent of total pharmaceutical consumption, they have the highest market share of any pharmaceutical product. The pharmaceutical industry extracts antibiotics from fermentation broths.

GEA Westfalia Separator supports this process with special decanters which result in efficient direct extraction which is simultaneously kind to the environment.

Extraction always consists of mixing and separating, processes which can be viewed as a complex. This is why GEA Westfalia Separator developed a patented extraction decanter for extracting active ingredients which combines the two process steps, mixing and separating, in a single machine. This decanter allows suspensions with a high solids content to be processed, and this property makes it suitable for direct extraction of antibiotics from the culture solution, which has a high mycelium content. Filtration, which used to be essential, is thereby rendered obsolete, and the continuous process avoids losses of valuable material, a problem associated with filtration.