Soane Energy, a Cambridge, MA, startup that says it’s applying polymer chemistry and surface science to the development of cleaner and more efficient techniques for extracting oil and gas, announced today that it has obtained Series A venture backing from Intervale Capital and CTTV Investments, the venture arm of Chevron Technology Ventures. The amount of the funding was not disclosed. The company says it hopes to use its technology to reduce the environmental impact of the toxic tailing ponds created by petroleum extraction from the oil sands of Alberta, Canada.

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[This post originally appeared on OVP Venture Partners' blog---Eds.]

Many observers, myself included, consider the 1990s the decade of the computer scientist. Work in digital bits and bytes not only generated significant wealth, it raised the standard of living for hundreds of millions of people around the world. However, as we close out the first decade of this century, I believe that materials and molecules have already supplanted bits and bytes as the powerful agents for the next round of prosperity and growth. This is the decade of the materials scientist.

Stanford University economist Paul Romer stated, “Economic growth occurs whenever people take resources and rearrange them in ways that are more valuable.” In the 1990s and into the first years of the 21st century, this resource rearrangement was frenetically—and highly successfully—executed in the arena of information technology. Today, that resource rearrangement has slowed in IT and has accelerated in materials science. To put it another way, materials science is the new information technology and it is spurring advancement in the new energy economy of this and the coming decades. This shift promises some of the same economic momentum and standard-of-living improvements created by information technology in the 1990s.

Indeed, materials science and chemistry are today the nearly perfect embodiments of Paul Romer’s premise of technology and discovery as a key economic driver. These “hard” sciences create and combine chemicals, polymers, and solutions in an infinite and infinitely promising number of variations. The possibilities created by materials science open up countless innovative opportunities in the new energy economy—and elsewhere.

Several examples illustrate this idea:

—In a branch of physical chemistry known as exploratory synthesis, chemists mix selected elements at different temperatures and pressures with the only objective being: to see what happens. Recently, a mixture of copper, yttrium, barium, and oxygen was found to be a superconductor at temperatures far higher than anyone had previously thought possible, which will ultimately have a host of far-reaching implications for electricity transmission.

—My company, Seattle-based EnerG2, uses materials science to assemble breakthrough products at the molecular level. Right now, we’re focused on customizing electrode materials to enhance energy and power density in ultracapacitors, which store and release energy faster than conventional batteries. Controlling the molecular structure and assembly process of our engineered materials at the earliest stage possible provides flexibility, lowers costs, and maximizes performance. We effectively gave up on …Next Page »

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Microbia envisions a future in which specialty chemicals we take for granted, like the beta-carotene that goes in dietary supplements, will come from renewable sources instead of the usual petrochemicals. It won’t wean the world off oil, but it could enable this Lexington, MA-based company and its partners to claim they’re helping to green up the planet, all the while pursuing a $200 million market opportunity.

I heard the Microbia story last week during a conversation with CEO Richard Bailey. It’s kind of a twisting tale that begins with basic research at the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research in Cambridge and gave birth to a couple different companies along the way.

Before diving into all that, here’s the gist: Microbia now fashions itself as an industrial biotech company that has found ways to finesse yeast, bacteria and other fermentation materials into pumping out big-time yields of special chemicals. These new versions of carotenoid chemicals, like beta-carotene and canthaxanthin (used to make cheese look orange and salmon look pink, among other things), come from renewable sources instead of petrochemical derivatives.

The first two renewable products could arrive on the market in 2010 and generate as much as $200 million in revenue within the next three years, Bailey says. And he thinks Microbia can do it more cheaply, as long as oil is $50 a barrel or higher. (The price dipped to $39 a barrel a couple days after we talked.)

“Petroleum won’t be here forever,” Bailey says. “Green chemistry does sell, but it has to come at price parity,” to the existing methods.

How Microbia has gotten itself into this position is an interesting story about how science can lead down unpredictable paths. It was started in 1998 by scientists at the Whitehead Institute. The early work was heavy on how yeast strains become pathogenic, or diseased. This led to insights into how to turn yeast into a cheap, effective factory for all sorts of chemicals, Bailey says. The company put that knowledge to work via fee-based contracts with other companies, which reduced its cash burn for years, while another side of Microbia focused on using the knowledge to develop its own drugs.

Bailey, a veteran of Monsanto’s nutrition division, came on board as general manager to run the industrial side of the company back in 2002. At that time, the place had great science but needed some business strategy, in his view. “There was a lot of work on science; I’d argue too much,” Bailey says.

By 2006, as the drug development programs approached the hugely expensive pivotal trial stage, the industrial contracts couldn’t pay the bills anymore. “Even if we got paid by the wheelbarrow of cash every day, it wouldn’t be sufficient,” Bailey says. So management …Next Page »

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Theo Chocolate, Inc. wants to unlock the cocoa bean’s secrets. Together with chemists at the University of Washington, Theo’s chief operating officer and food scientist Andy McShea is using “electronic nose” lab techniques to identify the best organic bean he can find.

I met with McShea in the Seattle chocolate company’s office, which overlooks the factory floor and is filled with the pungent smell of roasting cocoa. McShea, a transplant from England and more recently from biomedical research (he came to Theo two years ago from the biotech company CombiMatrix, and before that worked at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center), is really enthusiastic about chocolate—good, organic chocolate, that is.

Last week, the organic and fair-trade chocolate company, which has been in production for three years, won a one-year grant from the Washington Technology Center (WTC) to develop new lab techniques for quality and safety tests of cocoa beans. Together with UW chemistry professor Rob Synovec, McShea aims to take chocolate production beyond the “look and sniff test,” the currently used, less-than-quantitative means of assessing bean quality.

In part, the research could help them consistently find a better bean. But the technologies can go further than that, McShea said. The company wants to increase production—the factory is currently operating at less than 20 percent capacity, McShea said—but to do that, it needs a bigger supply of high quality, organic cocoa beans from fair-trade sources.

“There are actually very few farms with great organic cocoa and high production levels, and they usually sell out,” McShea said. Since going for lower quality is not an option, Theo wants to use its knowledge of the bean to convert cocoa farms from conventional to organic—raising the quality of the beans and chocolate in the process.

Theo and the UW’s proposal for the WTC was entitled “Magic Bean.” “It’s more in reference to, ‘What is the magic of the bean?’” McShea said. “We’re not trying to create chocolate flavor out of some …Next Page »

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Mark Emkjer has resigned as CEO and director at San Diego’s Accelrys (NASDAQ: ACCL), which develops software for computer-aided design and modeling. The company says its board has named Todd Johnson as interim CEO.

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David Lucchino doesn’t like to use the word “coating” to describe the technology under development at his Cambridge, MA-based startup, Semprus Biosciences. Semprus, which was spun out of famous MIT inventor Bob Langer’s lab in 2007, is in the early stages of providing surfaces for medical devices engineered to fight bugs, prevent unhealthy blood clots, or promote tissue regeneration.

Semprus last week announced it closed an $8 million Series A round of venture capital co-led by previous backer 5AM Ventures, which has offices in Waltham, MA, and Menlo Park, CA, and new investor Pangaea Ventures, of New Jersey and Vancouver. Lucchino, CEO of Semprus, plans to use the new capital to advance the firm’s technology. And now I understand why “coatings” is a taboo word at Semprus.

When Lucchino hears “medical device coatings,” he says, he thinks of the silver-based antimicrobial coatings or coatings that leach heparin to prevent blood clots. Semprus uses polymers that form covalent chemical bonds with the surfaces of plastic devices like catheters or metal devices like bone plates and screws. Covalent bonds—for those who don’t remember high school chemistry or didn’t read Luke’s recent story on Avila Therapeutics—are among the strongest in nature.

With these covalent bonds, Semprus’ materials are intended to function on the surface of medical devices for up to 90 days, Lucchino says. That duration beats silver-based coatings, which wear off in a matter of a few days, he says. In the antimicrobial market, Semprus competes with Agion Technologies, a Wakefield, MA-based provider of silver-based coatings for medical devices and numerous consumer products. (I actually bought a pair of waterproof boots coated with Agion’s materials last month.)

But Lucchino (who is the nephew of Red Sox CEO Larry Lucchino) doesn’t want Semprus to become another coatings company, which in some cases means selling materials in bulk to manufacturers. One route to commercialize the firm’s surface technology, he says, would be to co-develop a product with a medical devices manufacturer. He is now in discussions with potential partners.

Lucchino says he believes that catheters and other devices surfaced with Semprus’s materials would fetch more money than those without it. Why? Such devices wouldn’t, in theory, need to be replaced as often as others, and would help avoid expenses due to infections or clotting. “I think the universe is changing,” Lucchino says. “I think the delivery of healthcare is being measured through an efficiency lens.”

There are certainly some who would disagree with Lucchino on that point, but growing U.S. investments in electronic health records and other measures to trim healthcare spending do indicate a move toward efficiency.

Also, give credit to Lucchino and Semprus for closing a first round of financing in an ugly market for early stage venture rounds. (The startup, formerly known as SteriCoat, had previously raised $2.5 million.) And Semprus’s new backer, Pangaea Ventures, is making its first healthcare investment with this deal, Lucchino told me. 5AM Ventures became the first institutional investor in the company last year, and 5AM managing partner Scott Rocklage became company chairman.

Lucchino first spoke to me about his plans to close this venture round in spring 2007, after he and MIT-trained chemical engineer Chris Loose, chief scientific officer of Semprus, won the MIT $100K business plan contest with the pitch for their startup. Even then, Lucchino and Loose were anxious to build a company. Now we’ll see what they can do.

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Last November I told you about Novomer, an Ithaca, NY-based startup using proprietary zinc- and cobalt-based catalysts to make plastic from carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide. Today the company, which is funded by Cambridge, MA-based Flagship Ventures, announced that it’s moving to Boston and gaining a new CEO, former Surface Logix CEO Jim Mahoney.

Novomer’s research and development operations will remain in Ithaca, where co-founder and chief scientific officer Geoffrey Coates is a professor of chemistry at Cornell University. The new Boston office will host Novomer’s business development and marketing teams, the company said.

Mahoney stepped down as CEO of Surface Logix, a Boston-based drug development company founded by Harvard scientist George Whitesides, in May. “The demand for alternative materials is set to explode, based on the need to reduce environmental impact and cut costs while vastly improving performance,” Mahoney said in today’s statement. “Novomer is incredibly well-positioned to lead the market based on the innovations of Dr. Coates and his team.”

Novomer president Charles Hamilton retains his post at the company, which also announced the appointment of Peter Shepard, former president and CEO of Nylon Corporation of America, as vice president of business development.

The catalysts discovered by Coates promote reactions between petroleum-based compounds called epoxides and carbon monoxide or carbon dioxide. Using CO, the company can make glassy or elastic polymers like those used food packaging and medical implants. Using CO2, it can create hard plastics like those used in computer cases and other electronics. In addition to its backing from Flagship Ventures, Novomer has received funds from DSM Venturing, Physic Ventures, the U.S. Department of Energy, and the National Science Foundation.

UPDATE 2:45 pm, 10/20/08: I just spoke with Mahoney, who says Novomer has launched its first product, a polymer used as a “sacrificial binder” by semiconductor manufacturers. It sounds pretty cool:

“As silicon wafers get thinner and thinner manufacturers need to adhere them to a more robust substructure as components are attached, then release them,” Mahoney says. “The current adherent materials are not sustainable and require multiple, time-consuming wash steps to get rid of. With our material you just heat it to 240 degrees centigrade and it breaks apart, releasing only water vapor and carbon dioxide, which is collected and recycled.”

Mahoney says Novomer was looking for a CEO because “it’s at the point where the technology is developed and it’s time to think about commercializing it, which is what my background is in.” He says Novomer will soon be pursuing a “much bigger” financing round than last year’s $6.6 million Series A round, and will “start to get into discussions with partners about what the manufacture, where to manufacture, and what types of products to move forward.”

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Updated, Oct. 8, 5 am PST: Roger Tsien was not only on the short list for the Nobel Prize in chemistry—he won it! See below for more details:

Was it me, or did researchers’ heads whip around yesterday as I walked through Roger Tsien’s biochemistry laboratory at U.C. San Diego?

If there was an atmosphere of excitement and anticipation in Tsien’s lab, it’s not necessarily because Xconomy has arrived in San Diego. (We launched the San Diego site Monday). Tsien had never heard of Xconomy, and he studied my business card—which consisted of “Xconomy.com” handwritten on the back of another business card—with an expression of…apprehension.

A more likely explanation for all the electricity in the air is that my friend David Pendlebury, who handicaps the Nobel prizes for Thomson Reuters Scientific, put the 56-year-old Tsien on his short list for this year’s Nobel Prize in chemistry.

Pendlebury, who bases his predictions on scientific citations of “high-impact papers,” also put Harvard’s Charles M. Lieber and Carnegie Mellon’s Krzysztof Matyjaszewski on his short list. The announcement in Stockholm by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences is scheduled for today.

Tsien, who was funny and self-deprecating, explained how his research led to the development of “fluorescent proteins” that have become a valuable new tool used in labs around the world for studying cellular activity.

A variety of fluorescent proteins and similar tools that Tsien and his colleagues developed now allow academic researchers to study changes in cellular acidity, calcium, oxidation reduction, and cyclic AMP, among other things.

But after developing a new technique and demonstrating one or two new applications in molecular biology, Tsien says he often moves on to other uncharted realms. He compared himself to John C. Fremont, the frontier pathfinder “who finds the pass but who is not the homesteading type.”

At another moment, he fatalistically compared his illustrious career to Woody Allen’s, saying, “I’m doomed to be this sort of comedic guy who just makes tools.”

Yet Tsien’s work led to the creation of San Diego’s Aurora Biosciences Corp., which developed new technologies for ultra-high screening of molecules as potential drug candidates. (Seed funding for Tsien’s startup came from Avalon Ventures, a San Diego venture firm headed by Kevin Kinsella.)

Tsien said his early investors “asked me if I was interested in being CEO, and it took me about two milliseconds to say no.” He has no interest in managing a business, and says, “It’s completely not within my talents.”

The value of his work was demonstrated, though, when Vertex Pharmaceuticals acquired Aurora in 2001 for more than $500 million. Tsien said his screening techniques also are used by San Diego’s Invitrogen, which supplies products and services to laboratories, and Senomyx, a San Diego biotech developing taste receptor technologies to discover novel flavors, and taste enhancers and modulators.

All of this might lead to a Nobel Prize for Tsien, or perhaps not. But a Woody Allen quote comes to mind.
“I don’t want to achieve immortality through my work,” he said. “I want to achieve it through not dying.”

Update, Oct. 8: The Nobel Prize committee today announced that Tsien will share the chemistry prize equally with fellow Americans Martin Chalfie of Columbia University and Osamu Shimomura, who is with the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, MA, and Boston University Medical School.

The prize carries with it a cash award of 10 million Swedish kronor, just over $1.4 million, which will be shared equally by the winners.

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Most Countries Unready for Future Broadband Needs

A group of MBA students has developed a Broadband Quality Score for 42 countries and found that the only country with enough bandwidth capacity to meet its needs in the next three to five years is Japan. Ars Technica reports that the score includes upload and download speeds and other measures. The United States, the study found, has slightly more capacity than it needs right now, but not enough to handle future demands, which will include visual networking, high-density streaming, consumer telepresence, and large file sharing.

Comcast Explains Bandwidth Caps to Customers

Comcast has begun sending emails to its subscribers to explain its cap on bandwidth use, which is set to go into effect October 1. The company says it is trying to put its 250-gigabyte monthly cap into perspective, saying that amounts to 50 million plain text e-mails, 62,500 songs, or 125 standard-definition movies. GigaOm reprints the full text of the e-mail.

Chemists Make Common Products a Little Greener

New regulations, growing consumer demand, and a fear of future lawsuits are leading companies that make consumer products to find ways to make them less toxic and more environmentally friendly. The Los Angeles Times reports that green chemistry is emerging in a variety of areas, from plastics and pesticides to toys and nail polish. While some makers of cosmetics and household cleansers are leading the way, others are lagging behind.

Contact Lens Delivers Drugs to Eyes

Dosing eyes with drugs to fight eye diseases is difficult, as eyes are very good at washing out foreign substances. Now an engineer at Auburn University in Alabama has developed a new material to make contact lenses that can absorb greater amounts of drugs than previously possible and release them slowly into the eye. New Scientist says that he has set up a company, OcuMedic, to commercialize the idea.

Virginia Court Tosses Anti-spam Law

The Virginia Supreme Court has overturned that state’s wide-ranging anti-spam law, ruling that it violates First Amendment guarantees of free speech. The Washington Post reports that the ruling also overturned the conviction of a man described as a prolific spammer. The law had outlawed all forms of unsolicited email, not just commercial junk mail.

Airplanes Remain No-Call Zones

Airlines have started providing Internet hookups on their flights, but at least one says that passengers won’t be allowed to use voice-over-Internet-Protocol to make telephone calls over the connections. The New York Times says that service-provider Aircell and American Airlines block Skype, Vonage, and similar programs, because they worry the conversations will annoy other passengers. No airline so far plans to allow phone calls.

Researchers Beam Solar Power Across Space

Researchers have collected solar power on a mountain-top in Maui and beamed it 92 miles to the big island of Hawaii. The experiment, by former NASA executive and physicist John Mankins, demonstrates how an array of solar power collectors in Earth orbit could transmit energy to Earth, Wired reports. Mankins predicts that such an orbital system, where solar energy is undimmed by clouds and atmosphere, could be put up in 10 to 15 years.

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Ever since scientists first figured out how to make carbon nanotubes—tiny cylinders of carbon with diameters of a few tens of nanometers—they’ve been touted as the material of the future: as strong as steel but far lighter, with the ability to conduct electricity in useful ways. The problem is that because they’re so small, it’s been difficult to make them at scales that would be useful to industry. You can’t really build a lightweight airplane a few microns at a time, after all.

Now a New Hampshire company, Nanocomp Technologies of Concord, says it has overcome that limitation, producing sheets of carbon nanotubes that measure three feet by six feet and promising slabs 100 square feet in area as soon as this summer.

“From the get-go, we wanted to build something that would be manufacturable,” says Peter Antoinette, CEO and co-founder of Nanocomp. “We’re out to make value-added components out of that material.”

The sheets, which the company can produce on its single machine at a rate of one per day, are composed of a series of nanotubes each about a millimeter long, overlapping each other randomly to form a thin mat. The tensile strength of the mat ranges from 200 to 500 megapascals—a measure of how tough it is to break. A sheet of aluminum of equivalent thickness, for comparison, has a strength of 500 megapascals. If Nanocomp takes further steps to align the nanotubes, the strength jumps to 1,200 megapascals.

The trick, says Antoinette, is being able to make the tubes a millimeter long. Many carbon nanotubes, in addition to having vanishingly tiny diameters, are at best a few tens of microns long (a micron is one-thousandth of a millimeter). So most production processes create what is essentially a powder of nanotubes, Antoinette says.

He won’t go into great detail about Nanocomp’s recipe for cooking up the tubes, but essentially the process works by taking a carbon-containing fuel, such as ethanol or methane, heating it up, and flowing it past a catalyst—a nanoparticle that can be made from any number of materials, including oxides of nickel, cobalt, or iron. Heat causes the flowing fuel to react with the catalyst, breaking off the carbon atoms, which build up on the catalyst, atom by atom, into a nanotube. The size of the catalyst determines the diameter of the nanotube.

Antoinette says Nanocomp’s technical achievement was to figure out a way to maintain the catalyst particle at the desired size and hold it stable long enough for the nanotube to grow to millimeter length. A computer controlling about 30 different parameters in the process—including temperature, temperature gradient, gas flow rates, and the chemistry of the mix—allows the builders to control the properties of the tubes. One setting gives them single-walled tubes, and another gives multi-walled versions, with one cylinder inside another, which provide different properties. “We can dial it in,” he says.

So what do you do with the stuff once you’ve made it? Antoinette says the sheets would be particularly good for shielding electronic components from electromagnetic interference. He’s talked to manufacturers of cell phones and PDAs who are looking at the material as something they could use to build handsets that are less vulnerable to the noise from stray transmissions. It might also make a nice housing for a computer, with aligned nanotubes acting as an antenna for wireless connections and randomly oriented nanotubes protecting the computer from electrical surges, while the material also dissipates heat from the processor.

Someday Antoinette would like to see the nanotubes built into composites, similar to the carbon fiber composites being used for next-generation airplanes such as the Boeing 787. But even before that’s done, the current material can solve a problem designers are having with those carbon fiber composites—the fact that …Next Page »

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Many industrial processes such as coal gasification create carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide as waste products. Usually, these gases are vented straight into the atmosphere, where they contribute to pollution and global warming. But what if they could instead be diverted into a chemical process for making some useful material—say, the plastic case of your computer, or the plastic capacitors and resistors inside said computer? Not only would this spare the atmosphere, but it would make plastic manufacturing cheaper by reducing the volume of petrochemicals needed as feedstock.

If you were launching a cleantech company, you’d be hard-pressed to come up with a better elevator pitch than that. But you’d have to, because that’s exactly the message from Novomer, an Ithaca, NY, startup that came to our attention today because it’s announcing a $6.6 million Series A funding round co-led by Cambridge venture capital firm Flagship Ventures and a new San Francisco venture fund called Physic Ventures.

Novomer’s process, based on a proprietary metal catalyst discovered by Cornell polymer chemist Geoffrey Coates, is ripe for commercialization for at least three reasons, says Flagship partner Jim Matheson. “First, it’s environmentally appropriate,” Matheson says. “It uses a lot less fossil fuel, energy, and water in the production of polymers; it leverages a greenhouse gas as an input for the feedstock; and the plastics have favorable biodegradability attributes.”

Second, in contrast to biologically based polymer production processes developed by other cleantech companies such as Cambridge-based Metabolix, Novomer’s chemistry is “a precision process,” Matheson says. “Because it’s synthetic versus biological, you can pretty tightly control the quality and attributes of the polymers. You can build a variety of products that do things you couldn’t do before, or do things better than what we already have.”

Finally, Novomer’s scientists believe that once they’ve scaled up their process to commercial levels, it will be cheaper than traditional methods of making plastic. The technology already works well at the bench-top scale, according to company president Charles Hamilton. After almost three years of lab work, funded with grants from the National Science Foundation, the Department of Energy, and the State of New York, it’s now time for Novomer to identify the most profitable applications and get the technology running in larger pilot facility—which is why the Series A round will come in handy.

“We’re a small company now, with 10 people, so I’m not going to be competing on price with the world’s largest chemical companies today,” Hamilton says. “But with the right partners the potential is definitely there to make polymers that will compete on price. The funding will help us figure out exactly which technology we’re going to scale and find great industrial partners and end customers.”

The company has a choice of products to develop because its secret ingredient—Coates jokingly calls it “zinc-based pixie dust”—catalyzes reactions between petroleum-based compounds called epoxides and either carbon monoxide or carbon dioxide. The CO-based process can be used to create a common class of plastics called polyhydroxyalkanoates, or PHAs, glassy or elastic polyesters that are commonly used in food packaging, paper coatings, and medical implants. The CO2-based process, meanwhile, results in aliphatic polycarbonates or APCs—hard, transparent plastics often used in injection-molded and extruded products such as glasses, windows, computer cases, and electronics.

Interestingly, Hamilton says he doesn’t press too hard on the company’s environmental message when he’s meeting with potential partners and customers. “We don’t want to hit people over the head with the green message,” he says. “We want to hit them over the head with on price, performance, scaling, and customized materials.”

Being green, Hamilton argues, won’t by itself get a new enterprise very far in an economy still focused on a single, monetary bottom line. “People can be excited about green innovation, and if that’s what opens doors and makes people listen, I’m all for it,” he says. “But the business case is what’s going to change the way the world makes materials.”

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How much does it take to jumpstart a serious academic research initiative these days? Apparently the answer is $20 million.

That’s the amount pledged for two different projects announced this week. One is an initiative at MIT to study major psychiatric diseases including bipolar disorder, depression, and schizophrenia, and the other is an agreement between Harvard researchers and German chemical giant BASF to support postdoctoral students studying a range of problems in physics, chemistry, and biology.

At MIT, the McGovern Institute for Brain Research announced that it has received a $20 million gift from MIT alumnus James Poitras and his wife, Patricia, of Narcoossee, FL, to create the James W. and Patricia T. Poitras Center for Affective Disorders Research. The funds will go to support research into the genetic and environmental roots of depression and related illnesses, which are estimated to affect 9.5 percent of the U.S. population, or some 21 million people, every year.

“We decided many years ago, when bipolar disorder first affected our family directly, that our philanthropic efforts would be directed towards this area of brain research,” the Poitrases said in a statement. “We could not have imagined then that this perfect synergy between research at MIT’s McGovern Institute and our own philanthropic goals would develop. We are very hopeful for the future.”

At Harvard, the Office of Technology Development (the university’s licensing wing) and BASF announced an unusual five-year, $20 million initiative designed to “foster a vibrant and dynamic intellectual exchange” between the university and the company. BASF will fund proof-of-concept projects within Harvard’s School of Engineering and Applied Sciences and will have the right to develop market innovations with commercial potential.

Specifically, Harvard and BASF said they will initially investigate problems such as building polymer structures that could deliver active-ingredient molecules to specific places, in the human body or elsewhere, and controlling the growth of biofilms, microbial communities that grow on surfaces and cause problems in medical and industrial settings.

“We must be as innovative in funding and translating research as we are in conducting it,” said Venkatesh Narayanamurti, dean of Harvard’s School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, in a statement. “By establishing the BASF Advanced Research Initiative at Harvard, we can bolster our existing excellence in basic and applied research, and develop new ways to bring research out of the lab.

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