Silica technique splits up chemicals

A $10m (£6.5m) deal with University College Cork (UCC) spin-out Glantreo could drive forward a chemical separation technique that will speed up the process of drug discovery.

The contract, with an unnamed US company, is set to commercialise a process known as sub2sila, which builds on existing methods to prepare silica particles for use in chromatography.

Dr John Hanrahan, Glantreo’s chief technical officer, said: ’Chromatography is a method of separating and quantifying chemical mixtures. This separation is done using a tube filled with porous silica particles.

’The presence of the porous silica particles, which are typically three microns large, means that some chemicals will spend longer in the tube than others, helping to purify and separate chemicals within the mixture,’ he added.

The problem with the existing method of producing silica particles is that it cannot distinguish between particle size.

“The beauty of our process is that you get exactly three microns and can eliminate the fishing step”

Hanrahan said that only 10 per cent of particles produced using the traditional method are the right size and many weeks are spent fishing out the three-micron particles.

’You get small particles maybe from one micron to large particles of maybe 10 or 20 microns,’ he said. ’The beauty of our process, however, is that you get exactly three microns and can eliminate the fishing step.’ Glantreo claims its sub2sila method can provide a 100 per cent yield of silica particles. It also believes it will reduce the time taken to perform chromatography by about five weeks.

Hanrahan added that this will significantly reduce the time taken to discover life-saving drugs by increasing the number of new drug molecules that can be screened and tested.

It also has applications in the food, beverage and forensics industry, where there is a common need to purify complex chemical mixtures.