Project description
Innovative material for faster drug development
Purification is key for all chemical industries. However, existing techniques are expensive, slow and inefficient in terms of energy consumption. This poses problems for health, safety and the environment. It’s also why purification represents an obstacle in drug discovery. The EU-funded SEP43 project will enter the market in drug discovery with a breakthrough multicapillary material that solves problems related to purification in the pharmaceutical and chemical industries. This disruptive technology decreases by an order of magnitude the operational pressure currently needed to separate molecules. Protected by six international patents, it is the first material to allow faster drug and chemical development at a lower cost, with a safer and more eco-friendly industrial process.
Objective
SEPARATIVE SAS is an industrial startup located in the heart of the “Chemical Valley” in France, surrounded by major pharmaceutical and chemical companies. We have designed, developed, manufactured a small series, and achieved a breakthrough multicapillary material that solves problems related to purification in the pharmaceutical and chemical industries. From this innovation, we have obtained 5 patents for the material and its manufacturing process. Our chromatography column, SEP43, is the first to meet the industry need to purify molecules to high purity quickly and at low pressure.
Purification is key for all chemical industries. Yet, current techniques are expensive, slow, energy intensive, and create issues for health, safety and the environment. Hence, purification has become a lock in drug discovery. SEP43 would enable faster drug and chemical development, at lower cost, with a safer and more eco-friendly manufacturing process. This is in line with the European Green Deal as the use of our product would save up to 20,000 mt of CO2E from solvent incineration, 8000kw/h electricity consumption and solvent cost of €9.6M/year.
The current pharmaceutical chromatography market is worth over 3B€. Our technology is well-positioned to rapidly become the preferred solution for both R&D and process-scale purification. Our strategy is to enter the market in drug discovery and to follow the molecule life cycle toward the process-scale before branching out to other chemical sectors. This first business case will generate the needed cash flow to invest in further product development and promotion.
Our prototypes have been successfully tested at TRL6 by independent laboratories. But as an equity-intensive and deep-tech project, we have been unable to attract sufficient funding to scale-up and automate our production line. The current project would enable us to deploy this strategy and provide a much-needed breakthrough that can be rapidly adopted by a very large market.
Fields of science
Keywords
Programme(s)
Funding Scheme
SME-2 - SME instrument phase 2Coordinator
69190 Saint Fons
France
The organization defined itself as SME (small and medium-sized enterprise) at the time the Grant Agreement was signed.