Genevac was founded in 1990 by Dr. Michael Cole and was started as a small family owned business specializing in the manufacture of corrosion proof vacuum pumps and centrifugal evaporation equipment for the life science research laboratory. The Cole Vacuum Pump (CVP) was the world’s first corrosion proof, high vacuum, low maintenance laboratory pump. The CVP provided the platform for the expansion of Genevac into the centrifugal evaporation market and between 1990 and 1995 Genevac manufactured and sold centrifugal evaporators for general purpose use in life science research.
In the mid-1990’s Genevac responded to the industry need for new technologies to support faster drug discovery and development and focused on creating a new class of laboratory evaporation equipment specifically designed for combinatorial chemistry and its related applications. The EZ-2 and HT-4X Centrifugal Evaporators were designed to meet the high demand throughput, synthesis, solvent evaporation and purification needs of drug discovery and combinatorial techniques.
Genevac has outpaced the competition by partnering with their customer/client base and understanding the obstacles to the use of centrifugal evaporation/concentration systems. One of the first significant advances was the development of the Genevac SampleGenie. The SampleGenie is a novel approach to taking large single or multiple source fluid volumes and concentrating them into a single, small storage vial-right inside the centrifugal evaporator.
Centrifugal evaporators traditionally required add-on low temperature vacuum line traps to collect any condensables being removed during process but before getting to the oil sealed vacuum pump. Condensables by-passing the trap would lead to premature vacuum pump performance degradation or failure. Genevac solved this often problematic configuration by incorporating an oil free pump and the revolutionary Speed Trap. The Speed Trap is an on-board highly resistant -50C trap that uniquely captures the solvents coming off the centrifugal evaporator and traps them away in a liquefied form. This allows fast and easy removable of the condensate and minimizes downtime of the centrifugal evaporator to minutes since there is no defrosting of a frozen condensate and no awkward emptying of independent vacuum traps.
As the use of centrifugal evaporation and concentration grew as a scientific technique Genevac identified that one of the greatest needs was for users to be able to quickly process larger volumes of solvents in parallel and without supervision. Although rotary evaporators have traditionally been utilized for this type of evaporation/concentration the process requires regular supervision and multiple pieces of equipment. In response to this need for unsupervised evaporation/concentration of larger volumes of solvents in parallel Genevac designed and developed the Rocket. This revolutionary approach to large solvent evaporation is based on its unique ability to utilize low temperature steam as a heat transfer medium to the product containers in the centrifugal evaporator thus significantly decreasing drying time and eliminating the need for continuous supervision.
Genevac is located in Ipswich in the United Kingdom.
Whenever there is a requirement for evaporation or concentration Genevac has the solution. Genevac trademarks include EZ-2, miVac, HT Systems, SampleGenie, Rocket, Speed Trap, Coolheat, SampleGuard, Dri-Pure and LyoSpeed.