The Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, a think tank based in Washington DC did a survey and found that there are more commercially available nanotech products.

Maynard and his co-workers found 212 products that use nanotechnology. This is double the number found by a similar survey carried out last year by EmTech Research, a pro-industry research group based in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Nearly half of these products were creams, cosmetics and supplements, designed to be applied to the skin or taken orally.

Nanobio is but a small subset of nanotech, but the increasing commercial viability has to be a good sign for the field.

Nature article (subscription required).

A recent article in Nature Biotechnology covered the wooing of investors and the things they look for in a startup company.

One of the most enduring myths about the commercialization of biotech products is that venture capitalists (VCs) are interested in funding only the hottest new science and technologies. Equally widespread is the enduring  (and mistaken) notion that biotech entrepreneurs benefit, in the long run, from hyperbole because it fuels the kind of media exposure that whets the appetite of investors.

I thought one of the most interesting sections dealt with the investors interpretation of wording used to describe the company. They translated virtually every term I have heard applied to biomimetics and nanobio start-ups into ‘too much risk…including such often heard phrases as ‘disruptive technology’, ‘emerging technology’ and technology that ‘redefines markets’. 

Nature PDF subscription required

The TEl Aviv based Interdisciplinary Center for Technology Analysis and Forcasting released a set of tech predicitons with dates of first widespread commercializtion.  These numbers look more realistic than any I have seen in tech journals and may reflect the academic rather than bussiness slant of the predictors. 

Examples of envisioned developments (partial findings):

	Year	Impact	Prospects
Labs on chip widely used (including in households)	2013	73	67
Nanomachines for theranostics used inside the body	2025	69	53
Protein chips for personal use	2018	65	60
In-vitro tests with cells on chips replace animal tests	2013	67	58

 

Predictions

This Barron’s article proposes that an intereting upcoming IPO is Biomimetic Theraputics which produces a bone replacement material such as the ones I have discussed elsewhere and here, with the added benefit of growth factors built into the material.

Article

Biomimetic Theraputics

The Biomimetics Networks for Industrial Sustainability (BIONIS) is a group of industry and academic organizations that organized to explore biomimetic technologies. The initial funding was through a program much like the SBIR program Ilya wrote about earlier.  The start up funding seems to have run out but the group synergy was enough to inspire one of the industrial participants to continue funding for an unspecified time. The goals of the organization are a mix of perfectly reasonable and probably quite productive… 

The best avenue for preliminary biomimetics research funding is still the governement. The German equivalent of the US National Science Foudnation, the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) just announced its new ‘Priority Programs’.  Among them, under the engineering rather than natural science was this project:

Interaction and lasting dialogue between biologists and engineering scientists forms the heart of the Priority Programme “Natural and technological flow control”. The scientists and researchers involved in the programme aim to translate examples from nature into technical applications, a process known as bionics or biomimetics. The use of biological surface structures reduces the flow resistance of objects such as turbine blades, around which flow takes place, as well as minimising noise levels. Engineering science, for its part, inspires new methods and leads to new findings in life sciences. (Coordinator: Prof. Cameron Tropea, Technical University of Darmstadt)

 Press release

A biotech firm makes the following statement in a press release:

  PolyMedix develops biomimetics - novel non-peptide small molecule drugs which mimic the activity of proteins, but will be inexpensive to make and formulate into drugs.

This qualifies as ‘biomimetics’ because the motivation for their methodology in generating the combinatorial design was to imitate ‘host defense proteins’.

My problem with this biomimetics research is that at first glance it seems to leap over the discovery and investigative phases of research. In this case I think these ground breaking phases are buried in well understood concepts of reaction to pathogenicity.  That makes this research a manipulative phase program. 

  Press Release 

I have been looking hard for examples of actual bioinspired design with little success. This ‘green’ building in Harare, Zimbabwe, might be an example, though I would need to understand the inspirational process used by architect Mick Pearse.

Termites must maintain a very constant 87 degree F temperature in their mounds or the fungi they cultivate will not do well. They construct mounds that can tower over 10 feet in height and might contain several hundred thousand to millions of workers.  These desert insects are faced with a serious heating/cooling problem with no refuge to be found in technology.  They take advantage of the thermal inertia of their mound and the daily swing in air temperature to cool the mound 24/7.  At night, cool breezes flow in through myriad tunnel openeings to carry away heat left from the day.  As dawn breaks holes are patched in some places and open in others to ensure that the flow of air in the heat of the day follows a circuitous route from the bottom of the termitary to the top.  This allows the entering warm air to be cooled by the thermal mass of the lower quarters.  By constantly opening and closing vents to take advantage of breezes, and by maintaining a cool inner core to the mound the termites are able to keep a surprisingly even internal temperature.

The building in Harare is passively cooled: the architects saved 20% of the cost of the building by forgoing the imported A/C system.  There are few windows and the windows are well shaded from the sun, minimizing incoming radiated heat is a major design consideration.   Fans blow all the time moving air from outside to in through a carefully calibrated route that maximizes cooling of the incoming air during the day and cooling of the building by incoming air at night.  This works because of the warm/temperate climate, with 15 degree C temperature changes there is an opportunity every night to dump the heat fo the preceeding day.

So, the principals of passive heating and cooling are certainly practiced by termites, and this is the same ‘technology’ that the arcitects used..  Was the design really bioinspired? Or is it a case of a parallel drawn to the general technology of passive cooling after the fact? 

Web Site

The 2005 World Exposition in Aichi, Japan has a biomimetics friendly theme - “Nature’s Wisdom”. The theme seems to be predicated on the ‘green’ argument for imitating nature rather than the market oriented motivation I think will win the day. Nevertheless, the technology section of the expo announcement proclaims that

Expo 2005 suggests that the true meaning of technology is to draw out the hidden potential of nature so that it has new purpose.

Web Site

The Department of Defense has two programs that might be of interest to companies looking to commercialize biomimetic concepts.

The Small Business Innovation Research program (SBIR) has a budget of over $1B and a mandate to provide funding to small, hi-tech businesses to research, design, develop and test prototype technologies related to specific Defense needs. Four times a year, the DoD posts “Solicitation Topics” (you can download the list of topics here or search for topics by keyword here) for projects they are willing to sponsor.

Small businesses, companies with fewer than 500 employees, can apply first for a six-month to nine-month phase I award of $70,000 to $100,000 to test the scientific, technical, and commercial merit and feasibility of a particular concept. If phase I proves successful, the company may be invited to apply for a two-year phase II award of $500,000 to $750,000 to further develop the concept, usually to the prototype stage.

The second, smaller, program is called Small Business Technology Transfer or STTR. It is also a three-phased program; however, STTR funds cooperative R&D conducted jointly by small businesses and research institutions, such as universities.

The DoD’s STTR program had $124 million in funding for 2005. (Other Federal agencies run their own STTR programs though I am not sure that they fund biomimetic projects to the same extent as the DoD.)

Two recent STTR awards illustrate the DoD’ s interest in bimimetic research:

Adam has written about the commercial possibilities of the Lotus Effect now the Air Force wants Luna Innovations and the researchers at the University of New Mexico to take the basic research and investigate how to develop ultrahydrophobic coatings that are simple to apply using conventional techniques (link to pdf). For the military surfaces that repel water “have huge opportunities in the area of corrosion inhibition for metal components, antifouling for marine vehicles, chemical and biological agent protection for clothing, among many other applications.”

Meanwhile, the Army wants Infoscitex and Case Western Reserve to work on a James Bondian artificial gill system. The contract for Phase 1 research, which will “propose the development of a biomimetic synthetic gill design based on the subdividing regions of clef, filament, and lamellae found in natural fish gills” was awarded last August.

Companies and researchers in the later phases of commercializing biomimetics research should definitely keep an eye on opportunities presented by the SBIR and STTR programs.