Zaiput Flow Technologies

ANDREA ADAMO: My name is Andrea Adamo. I come from Italy. I came 15 years ago with a Fulbright fellowship and I worked at MIT as a graduate student first. And then a journey that changed me started as I discovered the beauty of entrepreneurship.

So in my professional journey, most of it was actually at MIT with Klaus Jenson as a postdoc and then a research associate. I started looking for technologies that could be spun out in a company. I still have a part time appointment at MIT. And now, I am the founder and CEO of Zaiput.

So Zaiput wants to make a difference in flow chemistry. So flow chemistry is a discipline in which people try to have things react as they flow, as opposed to reacting in batch in a vessel. The idea is not really new, as the oil industry has been using this probably for 50 years or more. What is new is applying this approach to small scale and to high order value molecules.

Flow can deliver robustness, can deliver quality, announces the parameter space that you can use in your reaction. So there's a number of technical advantages that make it very interesting. And pharmaceutical companies have realized that they have been investing in the last few years. There's notable examples at MIT and in Europe.

So in this context of flow chemistry, Zaiput wants to deliver new hardware to enable this approach and make it a reality. In other words, if you think of the assembly line that Ford developed the beginning of the last century, what it does are some sort of continuous process in which he assembles cars. The idea is similar for continuous flow chemistry. You can have a continuous process, a continuous flow where we assemble molecules. And at the end, you have your final product. Call it a drug, call it a perfume, whatever that is.

Zaiput is commercializing MIT's technology that accomplishes liquid liquid separation. So you have types of liquids that are not mixable, think of water and oil. You can think of the salad dressing, you can see the little droplets. We separate them out. So you send in water and oil, so to speak, is typically an organic solvent in the context of chemistry. But the oil worked for the example, and we separate it out.

So this is the small scale device that Zaiput is commercializing, is for laboratory scale. So if you are, say, a chemist in a pharmaceutical company in a research lab, you would send your two phase flow from here. And the separation occurs in the bottom. There's a porous membrane. And the porous membrane accomplishes the separation using surface forces.

So think for instance, of the non-stick pan that you have at home. If you put oil, the oil will spread out. If you put water, the water builds up. So we use exactly that principle to separate out.

In order to have complete separation, you have to control the pressure on either side of the membrane. So we have integrated here on the top of the device, a high precision differential pressure controller. So all it does, this part of the device embedded in here, is make sure that the membrane, you have always the correct separating condition.

And as a result of the way it's built, is actually the device is modular. There's some feedback mechanism, so if the operator changes condition, this adapts. So this becomes a plug and play unit. We are working on bigger brothers so that the process that you make can be taken to the production floor.

The reason people should be interested in this is because the alternative is essentially a container where you have things settled by gravity. And sometimes, you get little emulsions, little droplets that take forever to separate.

Sometimes your compounds are very expensive. So a jar, which a production scale would be thousands of liters, thousands of gallons, it's very valuable. And so there's a number of technical advantages that make this a compelling proposition for the field.

ANDREA ADAMO: There is another application that Zaiput put this plan into push, that is putting these devices in arrays and have complex extraction cases.

So the device [? proceeds ?] as a separation. So you have two liquids mixed together, mixed up, and you separate them out. The chemist likes the separation action for the sake of an extraction.

Let's say you think of wine and oil. Actually, let's start with water and oil. You put them together, separate them out, you still have the same thing. If you do it with wine, now when you separate them out, you don't really have the same thing. Because the wine has the alcohol and the alcohol goes also into the oil. The alcohol likes both. So the alcohol will partition, that's what the chemist would say, or the chemical engineer. So when you separate them out, you have two different things.

And so chemists have been using this technique for decades. It's not new, the technique, but what we think is new is the way to implement it and make it really easy for people to deploy.

And so let's say that you have the wine and the oil. How much alcohol has gone into the oil? Maybe 10%? Whatever that is, if you want more, then you have to repeat the process, so you want to cascade them.

So in the industry, this process is done with tall columns, 30 meters high. We think that we can do it with boxes full of devices. We have proof of that. And we think this is going to be really compelling for people in the field.

In the laboratory, typically, they take a-- it's called separation funnel. So it's a sort of funnel shaped bottle. They shake so that you mix things up and then you wait.

So in this thing, the shake would be done by the flow itself, as things flow in. And that wait-- but it would be this, as opposed to the fact that you don't really have to wait any longer.

So the advantage for the customer is the simplicity of use, the almost instantaneous separation, as opposed to a long wait time, and the possibility of cascading, and the fact that now you have a unit that is easy to implement in a flow process. So if you think of the assembly line, say, for the cars-- you put the doors, then you put the rivets, then you paint, and so on and so forth.

So in the chemistry analogy, you would have a reaction, then you would have a separation, then another reaction. So the Plug and Play refers to the fact that these are easy to plug it and deploy it and play with it in the context of a process. So you don't need to go there and play around because it's finicky to use. It's just readily available. And so it saves the time to the chemist to put together a complex application.

The idea of separation and extraction is really old. The first innovation that happened in the Jensen lab was the idea of using surface forces. So this analogy of the non-stick pan to separate out liquids, and that's actually a patented concept.

And then the second part, so there's actually two innovations in this product, is the way the pressure controller is built. So the first part gives you the principle that you can use to separate out. And the second part, meaning the pressure controller, makes it usable. The device does it for you, you don't have to play with pressures in a manual way.

Both innovations are actually from that lab. The first, I founded there. The second, the pressure controller, is actually stems off from my own work.

ANDRES ADAMO: The device in this specific form that you see, it has been sized up, so to speak for chemist replication. You can use exactly the same principle and design a little differently, maybe with larger membranes or maybe little differences in the pressure controller for other applications. You can think of applications in the food industry, where you have phases you want to separate out.

You can think of water remediation, for instance. So let's say that you have a gasoline spill in a lake. Gasoline is a low viscosity. Since things go through the membrane, low viscosity fluids are more amenable than say, crude oil that is typically thick. Also, crude oil typically has also particles, other material that could foul the membrane.

But gasoline doesn't, so you could get water from the surface of a lake that has been contaminated and flow it through the device and recover the gasoline. And actually, the type of recovery that we observe would suggest that you can use again, the gasoline. You can think of those applications, too. And we may be exploring them in the future.

You know, typically in new companies, they try to stay focused on a particular application and establish themselves and the technology. So this is what we are doing now.

But we are discovering actually, that separation, it's some sort of boundless type of environment. There's so many applications. Because typically, if you think of products, you want something that is homogeneous. And typically, the way you make things, you end up with a soup, with a number of things. And so membrane type of processes are very common for separating out, for identifying, capturing your homogeneous product.

So in the context of the chemical industry where we are working now, typically, you develop a process of the small scale. Look for different molecules and put together the way to make them. And then eventually, that process, you want to scale it up. Because you want to make more of that compound.

If you think of the pharma industry, you have the clinical trials. And in its level of clinical trial, you need different amounts of the compound. So every time you go from a level to the next one, you need much more. So you need to scale up the process.

In a scalable technology for the user, it's of great advantage. Because it means that it should be straightforward to go up to the next size, as opposed to having to re-tweak completely the process. So the technology is scalable in the sense that we can make bigger brothers. And we are actually very close to announce a bigger brother of this that will start addressing a so-called pilot plant towards small production scale.

ANDREA ADAMO: I always had the thought that I wanted to start some business, you know, find suitable entrepreneurial opportunities. My background is fluid mechanics. My PhD is on the interaction of sea waves and floating bodies. So I'm coming from a different corner.

And I built it in the lab because there was a need and because I was intellectually stimulated by solving the problem. It was one of the chemistry professors at the MIT, Tim Jamison, the department head, that one day told me, you know, this gadget that you've made. It's really useful. Maybe there's a market there.

And so I took his words very seriously. And I did go home and do the homework and found out that indeed, there was a business proposition. So that was the very beginning.

And MIT in general has been very supportive. I have had a great interaction with technology licensing office. And MIT has also the venture mentoring service that was actually quite helpful to enroll them and received very stimulating comments and ways to properly think of how to structure a business.

And indeed, one of the things I've learned, among the many, is that when you want to go from the theory to the practice, there's so many aspects that you have to look at. And the coaching I've received, it's really helpful to kind of pinpoint the critical points that are relevant to make the company successful or at least to try to.

So one of the things I realized as soon as I started commercializing the device is the variety of applications, of potential applications that could be there. So going to a conference, you know, you get all sorts of people, you know, in this case most chemists. Each one from a different field. And I realized that actually my view on the potential of the product was quite narrow, because you know chemistry is unbounded. Chemistry, in this case.

So I started feeling the crave for more connections and different inputs, you know, being exposed to different partners, different industries and try to identify if there's other opportunities or even better opportunities.

I think in this context, MIT exchange, Startup Exchange program, but also the activities of the ILP, could be critical in helping us finding potential partners or potential new applications. So I think that this opportunity that MIT offers is actually a great resource.

So we are located in Cambridge. And this is the place you want to be. So getting out from the door of, even of home and the company, within a few blocks, you have all the greatest pharmaceutical companies, you know, the most important ones. But you also have a lot of companies that are creating the future of the field. So very quickly, you can get connected with the opinion leaders, with the thinkers, also with the buyers, with the customers.

And I can not think of any other place in which that would happen in the same way. I would have to travel a lot to have, in the same afternoon, the same type of conversations that I can have. And also the MIT environment is actually helpful to get connected and introduced to local companies that, you know, at a level suitable enough to get relevant feedback.

ANDREA ADAMO: So the Galactic Grant for Space is an initiative of the state of Massachusetts with the organization CASIS, the organization that handles the experimentation on the space station, International Space Station. So the idea that grant is to identify experiments whose results collected in space benefit activities on earth. We applied and we were selected as a winner.

What we suggested is to explore how this separation behaves in space. So as I mentioned earlier, you know, our separation exploits surface forces as opposed to gravity. We would like to see, by removing gravity, how does that change? Because we have done our calculations making some assumptions and our experimentation making assumptions, but gravity is still here.

So a separator of these will be flown to space. There will be a set up for an astronaut to run some experiments. The data will be recorded, sent back to Earth, and compared. We think is a great opportunity that we are having for a number of reasons.

If you want to be forward thinking, you can think that this is one of the first steps to enable drug-making a space. So if you want to think of missions to Mars, missions to Pluto, probably, I guess the astronauts will take some pills, some drugs for the way. But for 20 years long trip, maybe you need also the capability to make your own chemicals, your own drugs in space. So there is a first step.

If you look at things in a shorter timescale, I think that the experimentation on the space station will provide very important results to improve our products and hopefully some advertisement. Space is cool. And we are happy we are going.

So we are setting up a little shop at Zaiput. The idea for the company is to drill down the space of separation, liquid, liquid extraction. We have realized out of the interactions that there is a huge potential, tremendous potential. Pardon me.

So the plan is to make bigger products so people that deployed can go to production. Also scale out, so boxes with advanced extraction factions. And then the company's planning to offer also knowledge in that domain. So we'll develop in-house services to help the customer identify the proper sets of chemicals to accomplish their extraction needs.

We are planning to-- we are actually looking for space to set up our own labs. We have partnered with Snapdragon Chemistry, which is a leading consulting company in the chemistry space, flow chemistry space. And so we think that from the partnership, we'll have access to state of the art flow chemistry knowledge. And that would help us, with our engineering expertise, provide outstanding service to customers.

MIT is devoted to excellence. We've learned that over here. Maybe we had it as a notion. That's also the motto for our company.