Three local venture firms put on what amounted to a university startup fair at the Charles Hotel in Harvard Square yesterday. I went hoping for a peek at a few of the companies that could be pulling down Series A rounds a year or two from now.

Now in its second year, the invitation-only University Research & Entrepreneurship Symposium was organized by Atlas Venture, Flybridge Capital Partners, and General Catalyst and sponsored by Boston-based law firm Goodwin Procter. The firms formatted the event so that university research teams with hot, potentially commercializable technologies had a chance to give their best 12-minute pitches to a large collection of venture capitalists and corporate representatives from all over the region. Attendees had one track to hear about nine companies in the life sciences industry, and other track for nine more infotech- and energy-oriented companies. The research teams weren’t just from places like Harvard and MIT, but represented 15 different institutions from around the country.

Eight of the presenting teams were from New England. One, Boston-based Novophage, is a company that Ryan already covered; it’s working on “engineered bacteriophages” to combat antibiotic-resistant bacteria such as MRSA. I couldn’t be in two places at once, so I had to skip presentations by three of the remaining seven local teams. But the following is a quick rundown of the four local presentations I did hear. All of these groups are in the lab-bench or seed-funding stage, and are looking for venture capital to get to the next step in the commercialization process.

Making Ethanol from Soybean Hulls—Without Destroying the Protein

Jonathan Mielenz of Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee and Dartmouth College in Hanover, NH, talked about a project with Dartmouth engineers John Bardsley and Charles Wyman to study soybean hulls as a potential raw material in the fermentation of ethanol.

Soybeans are used to make soy oil and other food products, and their hulls, which have a high protein content, are usually used as feedstock for cattle. That would seem to make them a bad choice as a source of biomass-derived ethanol; indeed, a lot of the effort in ethanol production these days is going into technologies, like ideas being developed at local firms like Mascoma and Verenium, that use non-food, high-cellulose sources such as wood chips or switchgrass.

But Mielenz said his group has come up with a simple way to ferment the sugars in soybean hulls without destroying the protein. The high-temperature pretreatment to which most other high-cellulose biomass is subjected before fermentation would break down the proteins in soybean hulls, Mielenz said. Simply by skipping this step, Mielenz says, his startup—which doesn’t have a name yet—found it was able to extract the sugars in the hulls without disrupting the amino acid sequences in their proteins, thus preserving their value as feed.

Selling the remains of the fermentation as feed could help bring down the net cost of ethanol production and make biofuels more competitive with fossil-based fuels, Mielenz argued.

Cheaper, More Powerful Methanol Fuel Cells

Nathan Ashcraft, a PhD candidate in the laboratory of Paula Hammond in the Chemical Engineering department at MIT, gave a talk about DyPol, a startup looking to commercialize a new, more efficient type of membrane for methanol-based fuel cells.

A methanol fuel cell works by exposing methanol on the anode side of the cell to a membrane where a catalyst such as platinum splits off protons and electrons. The electrons exit the cell to form an electric current while the protons travel through the membrane, meeting oxygen from air on the cathode side of the membrane to produce water as a waste product. DuPont makes the leading membrane material for methanol fuel cells, a polymer called Nafion. But Nafion has a few weaknesses, Ashcraft said; it’s costly to make; it depends a toxic fluorination process; and it’s easily permeated by raw methanol, reducing its efficiency.

Ashcraft and colleagues in the Hammond Lab, collaborating with a number of other labs around MIT, have devised a way to build polymer membranes layer by layer, allowing them to blend polymers that couldn’t otherwise be used together. The layers are less permeable to methanol, and can be created in a non-toxic, water-based solution. Prototype fuel cells built using the new membranes have 53 percent greater energy output than …Next Page »

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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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