Aiken County company invests in equipment to serve international clientele.

A South Carolina manufacturer of peptides is upgrading its North Augusta plant with equipment to help meet demand for its international customer base.

AmbioPharm, which also maintains its headquarters in North Augusta, produces peptide active pharmaceutical ingredients at varying scales, from a gram to kilograms, for some of the world's largest biotech and pharmaceutical companies as well as customers seeking small batches, according to its website.

Peptides are chains of amino acids the building blocks of proteins that are naturally found in your body, according to Health.com. Theycan also be found in foods, supplements, medications and skincare products.

"AmbioPharm South Carolina continues growth to meet capacity demands for late phase and commercial peptide production while increasing our sustainability efforts," the company said in a news release. "In order to meet customer needs, we continue to make state-of-the-art upgrades to our AmbioPharm South Carolina headquarters, including increasing synthesis capacity at this location."

New equipment includes a high-performance liquid chromatography column, a 1,000-liter lyophilizer, a tangential flow filtration system with centrifuge, a large walk-in stability chamber and a walk-in freezer.

The company said other equipment has been added to increase U.S. production using greener chemistry to support manufacturing, including microwave peptide synthesizers for small and larger capacity production, and chromatography equipment used to improve yield while discarding impurities.

The cost of the capital improvements was not disclosed.

The microwave peptide synthesizers...