On the 20th Anniversary of the inaugural Knutsford SciBar, we welcome Colin Banks, whose name may be familiar to many of you as Knutsford’s Town Mayor. Colin’s talk will address the subject of chromatography purification as it was practiced and how it evolved into a modern high precision technique. He will also describe how chromatography was hyphenated with flow chemistry to develop a robust continuous purification system.

Colin says “I retired in Jan 2023 after many years in the Chromatography business. I am a graduate Biochemist (Bristol) and came to Manchester to work in clinical chemistry at Manchester Royal Infirmary. It was the very early days of HPLC used in the clinical laboratory. In 1986 I started working for a Macclesfield company which was the last remaining UK manufacturer of HPLC equipment. I collaborated with Cliff Carless at Macclesfield DGH to install the first diagnostic system to determine glycated haemoglobin in the North West (a diabetes marker).
After sometime in analytical HPLC, I became involved in liquid chromatography for purification and was employed by one of the major innovators in the flash and prep chromatography industry. In 2020 I collaborated with Chris Thompson at Heriott Watt University to devise a completely new technique for continuous purification in the field of flow chemistry. I was co-author of the resultant paper published in Journal Of Organic Chemistry 2022.”