eMembrane is developing and commercializing hybrid analytical and industrial tools for (A) protein separation and (B) environmental monitoring by increasing the throughput and decreasing the time-to-market of the protein as a drug and the  preconcentrate process time of heavy metals, respectively. These will help to save from several hundreds of thousand to millions of dollars corresponding to the research organizations and large companies, respectively. The Company is targeting (1) the research organizations as potential direct customers and (2) large tool companies as potential joint development partners.

The Problem

The current worldwide market for protein separation is about $3 billion (2005). The current major technological tool, i.e., resin-based chromatography, for protein separation faces one major limitation: throughput. The throughput of chromatography is caused by three fatal flaws: (1) diffusion-limited: time-consuming protein capturing process, (2) pressure-drop: high pressure that leads to low protein capturing capacity, and (3) scale-up: nonlinear relationship between small laboratory scale and large industrial scale protein separation. In addition, the conventional resin-based chromatography does not efficiently capture large proteins, such as monoclonal antibodies, due to its small pore size of the resin. The limitation of throughput will then increase the protein’s time-to-market which leads to excess drug development budget and shorter intellectual property protection of the protein drug.

The Solution

A typical protein separation work flow includes pretreatment of protein solution by filtration, followed by several chromatography steps and finally another filtration to concentrate the protein. All processes generally account for 50 to 90% of the protein production cost and mostly dominated by the chromatography steps. eMembrane’s patented technology combines the filtration and chromatography into a hybrid membrane-based chromatographic tool. By attaching various chromatographic functional brushes onto a membrane, the above three problems can be solved via (1) convective-aided: fast protein capturing process, (2) negligible pressure-drop: can be operated at low pressure, and (3) easy scale-up: the amount of protein to be captured corresponds linearly to membrane’s surface area. Therefore, these significantly lead to enhanced protein separation productivity by cutting 50 to 90% of the protein production cost and decreasing the time to market. The hybrid tool can be scaled down to a small disposable device that captures micrograms to milligrams of proteins or scaled up to a membrane module that processes grams, kilograms to tons of proteins. Furthermore, the hybrid tool is also a drop-in tool that can be swapped into existing equipments without switching cost, extra set-up and training requirement.

The Problem

Preconcentrating of analytes, such as heavy metals or radioactive compounds, dissolved in environmental fluids such as river water, seawater, and effluents,  has adopted solid-phase extraction (SPE) as an alternative for liquid–liquid extraction. SPE is advantageous over liquid–liquid extraction because  it consumes of only a small amount of organic solvent and its easy operation as a cartridge. Solid sorbents used for SPE are made by chemical modification of polymer, silica, alumina, and carbon beads. Moreover, empty cylindrical cartridges with various diameters and heights for packing the sorbents have been commercialized to satisfy the requirements for an increasing number of applications such as environmental and agricultural monitoring applications. Most sorbents are in the form of beads; therefore, the bead-packed cartridge has a trade-off between the diffusional mass-transfer rate of the analyte into the bead and the flow-through pressure of the fluid across the bed height. In addition, a fraction of small beads can leak from the cartridge during operation.

The Solution

eMembrane have developed environmental monitoring tools containing various functional groups: ion-exchange and chelate-forming groups, hydrophobic and affinity ligands. Such analytical tools are chemical stable, economically feasible and can preconcentrate analytes in water at the parts per billion (ppb) level. In addition, such tools can be easily scaled-up for heavy metals removal or recylcing processes.