Industry Roundup: LiliChro Celebrates Five Years

This month marks five years since LiLiChro was established in Gödöllő, Hungary, in October 2021. Congratulations to founder and CEO László Frici Németh and the whole LiLiChro team on reaching this milestone.

Németh brought deep experience to the venture. Trained as a chemical engineer, with postgraduate study in chromatography at the Budapest University of Technology and Economics, he previously co-founded RotaChrom Technologies. There, in 2017, he and László Lorántfy used computational fluid dynamics to redesign CPC extraction cells. At LiLiChro he has continued that work on better, more efficient cells.

Five Years of Achievements

Centrifugal partition chromatography (CPC) dispenses with a solid support altogether. A liquid stationary phase is held in a cascade of extraction cells by centrifugal force, and compounds elute according to their partition coefficients between two immiscible solvents. With no silica to foul, sample recovery is essentially total, and loading capacity can far exceed that of prep–high-pressure liquid chromatography (HPLC).

LiLiChro’s contribution has been to make the technique behave more like conventional analytical chromatography. Its redesigned cells run at roughly 15–30 bar, against the 80–100 bar typical of competing CPC instruments, with stationary phase retention of 80–90% or better. The company has filed two international patent applications on its cell and rotor designs, published in 2024 and 2025.

The result is a family of four instruments built on the same geometry, so methods scale linearly by rotor volume:

The miniLiLi is the milestone chromatographers may find most striking. At 1 ml/min and 25 bar, it brings liquid–liquid separation to a flow regime familiar from HPLC. LiLiChro says a solvent system can be chosen by shake-flask testing in one to three days and fine-tuned on the miniLiLi in under a week, a welcome alternative to lengthy column screening.

The company has also extended CPC into continuous operation with true moving bed (TMB) systems. Instead of simulating a moving bed, as SMB does with solid columns, TMB physically switches the liquid phases between ascending and descending modes, with capacities from milligrams to tons.

Today LiLiChro serves pharmaceutical manufacturers, CMOs, CDMOs, API producers and natural extract companies, and exhibited at CPHI Milan in October 2026.

The Benefit to Chromatographers

For many analytical scientists, CPC has been a niche preparative tool, prized in natural products work but seldom seen alongside HPLC and gas chromatography (GC). LiLiChro’s first five years suggest that may change. Low operating pressures, high retention of the stationary phase and a single geometry from milligrams to kilograms address the scale-up headaches that preparative chromatographers know well, and the absence of a solid phase removes the fouling and irreversible adsorption that limit column life.

Congratulations to LiLiChro on five years of advancing liquid–liquid chromatography. We look forward to seeing where the next five take the technique.