Nanoclast

It still seems that the mob with pitchforks is in control of the issue of nanotechnology and food. I was reading a fairly balanced report in a publication called the Mindful Metropolis on the state of nanotechnology and food. It was thorough report with just a few hiccups, most notably the assertion that food companies spend “millions of dollars on nanotechnology research and development” and then noting that “food companies maintain a great deal of secrecy regarding nanotechnology programs.” If the latter is the case, it begs the question of how you could conclude the former.

But that is the way of this issue. Without any clear evidence of what types of nanomaterials are used in which food stuffs (we are not including nanoclays used as a filler for plastic packaging), much of the coverage of this issue is based on little more than speculation. An example of this is the various numbers provided for the amount of food products containing nanomaterials: “The Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars sets the number at 84; the Project on Emerging Nanotechnologies has the number at 98; and in a 2008 report on nanofood, Friends of the Earth identified 104 food and cosmetic products containing nanomaterials.”

Once again, we are told that labeling will cure this and inform consumers. But as I have argued before this proposal will do little to inform and do much to terrify people, often, if not completely, needlessly.

Then the piece really falls completely under the influence of a Friends-of-the-Earth (FoE) representative, which as an organization has demonstrated its aim to create an open debate on the uses of nanotechnology by boycotting public engagement meetings.

It all turns somewhat comical by the end when the FoE representative argues that even if nanoparticles are proven to be completely harmless in food, it would still be objectionable because people might be getting all their nutrients without eating fruits and vegetables. “What it comes down to, I’d recommend that consumers veer away from processed foods.” 

I am sure that this sentiment will really strike a chord with the affluent and comfortable who are concerned that their carbon footprint may be endangering the planet. But for the poor and starving it might be a pretty good thing to have a simple and inexpensive processed food that could supply your nutritional needs when you can neither grow nor afford the fruits and vegetables that would give you a balanced diet.

In a white paper on drug delivery I contributed to writing a couple of years ago and in the accompanying report, we argued that one of the key economic drivers behind nanotechnology in drug delivery was unlocking the hidden value of many pharma companies’ already developed compounds.

“The acceptance of new drug formulations is expensive and slow, taking up to 15 years to obtain accreditation of new drug formulas with no guarantee of success. Compounds which are highly effective, such as Taxol for the treatment of cancer, are also toxic to healthy cells, and current delivery methods are unable to target just the diseased cells, leading to side effects.

As a result, drug formulation companies are looking to make use of these already in-use drugs and finding better ways of delivering them to their targets. At present, several hundred billion dollars worth of existing compounds, which cannot be delivered properly are sitting in IP vaults unused, and the industry is keen to unlock and exploit this valuable intellectual property.

New drug delivery compounds will also extend the product and patent lifecycles of drugs, allowing the creation of New Chemical Entities (NCE’s) via reformulation of existing and/or orphaned compounds, and subsequent creation of value for shareholders and consumers. Many drugs are poorly soluble, a major problem when the human body is 70% water. In general, poor water solubility correlates with slow dissolution rate, and decreasing the particle size increases the surface area, which leads to an increase in dissolution rate.”

In a recent article in PharmaTech.com  an interview with several pharma experts indicates that one of the biggest impacts nanotechnology is having at least in health and medicine is the revitalization of “drying pharma pipelines”.

The disparate views in the piece hit on a number of areas that nanotechnology is impacting healthcare, such as analytical instrumentation or diagnostics. But one is struck by the example provided by Dr Gary Liversidge of Elan Drug Technologies launching five licensed products using the companies’ NanoCrystal technology with market sales of nearly $2 billion. “These and other nanotechnology-based products have moved the technology from the academic curiosity that it was in the 1980s to one that can potentially deliver real solutions for the many compounds that are poorly water-soluble,” says Liversidge in the interview.

This figure of $2 billion begs the question of whether I will have to resurrect my argument of “sine qua non” to explain to would-be economists that a few pennies of nanoparticles do create the value of a new drug formulation not just to market researchers but the companies producing them as well. 

But before I completely jump on the nanoparticles for drug formulation bandwagon, I have to concede that this recent article in which George Whitesides offers another perspective has left me somewhat in doubt. Whitesides argues that the focus should be on using nanotechnology for imaging and diagnosing rather than treatment because even though cancer treatments may be targeting cancer cells “Cancer cells are abnormal cells, but they’re still us."

I just read Neil Gordon’s piece over at Nanotechnology Now bemoaning the state of investment in and commercialization of nanotechnology for 2009 and for what appears to be another dismal 2010.

Mr. Gordon, who is currently the CEO of  Early Warning Inc., has been a long-time cheerleader of the prospects of nanotechnology even helping to found the Canadian NanoBusiness Alliance back in 2001, which now appears to have suspended operations based on their former URL having become a placeholder. (The curious phenomenon of nano trade associations I discussed here). 

So when you’ve been urging on a set of disparate technologies to have an impact on equally disparate industries for the better part of a decade, I can understand the frustration that can develop and it is certainly evidenced in this piece.

While Gordon makes a list, albeit a not particularly long one, of the nano-focused companies that closed up in 2009 (Nanogen, Evident Technologies, and NanoDynamics), we are beginning to see positive indications this year of how nanotechnology was expected to develop all along.

Big companies, like IBM, are beginning to get a handle on the science and fundamentals of working on the nanoscale and are now looking towards the engineering bit to start developing commercial applications. The signs are here, here and here that we are moving in the right direction.

But when you’ve been waiting 10 years and have pinned your hopes on a bunch of start-ups forming an “industry” the way it happened with the Internet, you’re bound not to see this as progress, perhaps just as further disappointment.

I certainly understand Gordon's impulse to see huge bonuses going to ne’er-do-well investment bankers as perverse while the sizes of those bonuses could have certainly kept a number of nanotech’s start-ups going for a while longer. But the question is, and one that will never be able to be answered definitively one way or another, even if all that bonus money had gone to the Nanogens and Nanodynamics of the world would it have led them to become successful and sustainable companies? Hard to say, but I think maybe not.

Last week, TNTLog responded to my previous blog “Nanotechnology Appears To Be in Retreat”. TNTLog rightly points out that some of nanotech’s declining fortunes is due to the global economic crisis, which Mr. Gordon cites as well, but adds that the writing was on the wall for many of these “nanotech” companies because of poor business models and an inability to see who their real competitors were, not just a matter of under capitalization and the global downturn.

It also argues that there is some room for optimism going forward based on the idea that there are companies out there that may not have “nano” in their name or can be easily identified as being involved in nanotechnology that in fact are being successful in engineering products with nanotechnology. I tend to agree.

I have sung the praises of Stuart Parkin previously on this blog to note that while Albert Fert and Peter Grünberg certainly deserved their 2007 Nobel Prize in Physics for their discovery of the material phenomenon known as giant magnetoresistance in 1988, it was indeed Parkin who pioneered the phenomenon into something that could be used in electronics. So the huge data densities we now have in our hard-disk drives is thanks in large part to Parkin’s work.

Stuart Parkin remains at IBM where he conducted his work in spintronics that led to the spin-valve read head and is currently the manager of the magnetoelectronics group at IBM Research - Almaden in San Jose, California.

Back in 2007, Parkin was letting it be known that he was working on research that combined the use of nanowires and spintronics, which could revolutionize computer memory. Now a little over two years later he is discussing this work again and provided a brief update.

Basically, Parkin and his team are placing nanowires vertically from a silicon wafers and these magnetic nanowires serve as the storage medium for the data. The data itself is encoded by the use of spintronics. Parkin describes it as, "Basically it's a disk drive on a chip. It would be entirely reliable, a million times faster and use a lot less energy."

In the last few years Parkin and his team have demonstrated that the device works in principal. However, Parkin cautions that it could take another five to eight years before it will be commercially available. 

I remember about 15 years ago when I was telling non-techie friends about spintronics and the enormous data capacity that was possible with it I would get a shrug and a response like, “What would you need a 100GB for?” I explained new programs would change how we use computers, but my explanations mattered little because they soon found out for themselves. What will we do with memory that is a million times faster? I am sure we’ll figure something out.

Researchers at the Tyndall National Institute in Cork, Ireland have announced a breakthrough in transistors and nanoelectronics with the design and fabrication of what they claim is the world's first junctionless transistor.

The research led by Professor Jean-Pierre Colinge has been published in Nature Nanotechnology and describes a control gate around a silicon nanowire that can tighten around the wire to the point of closing down the passage of electrons without the use of junctions or doping.

Colinge and his researchers expect that the design will prove particularly applicable in the manufacturing of transistors at the 10-nanometer scale.

The researchers are claiming that the transistor has a host of benefits, including “a near-ideal sub-threshold slope, extremely low leakage currents and less degradation of mobility with gate voltage and temperature than classical transistors” and perfectly compatible with CMOS manufacturing processes.

Tyndall CEO, Professor Roger Whatmore is quoted in the story referenced above as saying, "We are beginning to talk about these results with some of the world's leading semiconductor companies and are receiving a lot of interest in further development and possible licensing of the technology.

If the speed at which industry has pounced upon the research is any indication of its significance, this could be important indeed.

In the National Nanotechnology Initiative’s (NNI) recently released Supplement to the President’s 2011 budget several government agencies including the FDA and NIST have requested additional funding to research the environmental, health and safety (EHS) issues surrounding nanotechnology.

When all the requests are tallied the amount of funds targeted for EHS research will reach $116.9 million, an increase of 300% over 2006.

Andrew Maynard’s 2020 Science blog has a thorough run down of the details of the safety research from the budget. While Maynard remains humble about his own influence in this evolution of spending, we can see that the groundwork for this turnabout was laid out at least as early as 2008, or even earlier in 2006 when Maynard’s paper for Nature: Safe handling of nanotechnology had captured the imagination of the Chairman of the Science and Technology Committee, Bart Gordon (D-TN).

It was really clear sailing from that point on. The NNI must have recognized that priorities had changed, there was a new boss in town and they weren’t the same as the old boss so more money needed to be allocated to EHS research. And this year, with a Democratic President as well as Congress they needed to push through the new priorities in spending.

To illustrate just how closely the NNI has followed Maynard’s proposed budgets, check out the table below. This certainly demonstrates the power of an oft-cited Nature article.

Well done and chapeaux to Dr. Maynard. However, I am not sure that I entirely agree with one of his conclusions about what the impact of this increased research may be. Maynard finishes his blog with the following sentence: “And that’s good news for anyone hoping to see the emergence of strong nanotechnology-based solutions to a whole host of challenges.”

I agree with this to an extent. Further commercialization of nanotechnology needs to address EHS concerns or else risk the possibility of public backlash. However, of much larger concern at the moment for nanotechnology commercialization is funding and financing and some recognition from policy makers that the innovation models we are employing currently are not working for us anymore.

I can only hope that Maynard experiences the same success for his efforts in re-creating the innovation process as he has had in changing US funding of nanotechnology safety research.

The Australian Academy of Sciences in a soon-to-be-released report indicates that the number of nanotechnology companies in Australia is declining from an estimate of about 80 to around 55, and that the technology is simply not finding its way into commercial products.

According to the report, one of the key obstacles to this commercialization is “often dysfunctional” university intellectual property offices. I have covered this problem of poor tech transfer offices before when discussing a Cientifica report that came out late last year that recommended the following in order to start making money from nanotechnology: "Fire 90% of university tech transfer people and replace them with people who understand how small businesses and science based innovation actually works.”

While that draconian measure may in fact fix the problem (or not), TNTLog recently noted that once you overcome that hurdle you are faced with regional obstacles in the shape of poorly conceived government innovation frameworks. This failure of government research policy is particularly acute in Europe as a recent report  from the University of Cambridge’s Judge Business School details.

There have been at least two short-term results that I have noticed from this inability to get research from the lab into markets.

One is that Lux Research, which is widely referenced for its nanotechnology market numbers that finally reached an apex of $2.9 trillion by 2014 and $1.5 trillion for 2010, has reduced its estimates by 21% to $2.5 trillion in 2015.

The second result (or lack thereof) is that despite Australia’s Academy of Sciences noting the dwindling prospects of nanotechnology in its country, Australia’s Friends of the Earth will continue to portray nanotechnology as a monolithic industrial agent of heartless corporate globalization. Some things never change.

I am always a little amazed at the length we are willing to go to improve our personal electronics. Whenever I see the latest nanotech research that will improve our gadgets I'm reminded of Nokia’s and Cambridge University’s demonstration of plastic electronics that proposed a flexible mobile phone. I could never quite get my head around why we would want a mobile phone that you could bend when what we really want is a phone in which the battery doesn’t run out after a few hours.

In the latest research along the lines of improving our personal electronics experience an international research team led by Professor Liwei Lin at the University of California Berkeley has developed nanofibers that possess piezoelectric properties and can be woven into the textiles of clothing. The idea is that as you move about the bending and stretching will be cause the piezoelectric to generate electricity that can be used to power your personal electronics.

While other research teams have made this type of generator on the nanoscale, they did so with inorganic materials that were brittle and easy to break. The Berkeley team made the fibers with an organic material that are not only more flexible than their inorganic cousins but easier to produce in significant quantities.

While the article I reference above describing the research mentions powering hand-held electronics, I suppose it’s possible that ski jackets with MP3 players already built in will find this new energy source a nice alternative.

Despite this I am still a little confused as to why I would want this, but sometimes these decisions are based less on practicality and more on ineffable qualities such as “fashion”.

Late last year we got news that EPA was intending to research the toxicity issues surrounding nanoparticles. And at the beginning of this year we saw that EPA had some history of regulation to base its new research on when it came to one of the more problematic nanoparticles, nanosilver.

 (Just a personal aside, while I mistakenly stated (and later corrected) that EPA had regulations for nanosilver dating back to the 1950s, it seems I was not too far off actually. A reader who seemed to want anonymity pointed out to me that nanosilver algaecides have been regulated under FIFRA as a pesticide since 1954.  FIFRA was originally administered by the US Department of Agriculture but was transferred to EPA when it was founded. So nanosilver has been regulated under FIFRA for 50+ years. 30+ of those years silver has been regulated under FIFRA by EPA. While this doesn’t absolve me from my mistake, it does give you a bit more information.)

So, while EPA is busy determining the toxicity of nanoparticles for environment, health and safety, they are also looking at how nanoparticles are providing a new tool in the environmental remediation of toxic waste sites. In a recent online article in Environmental Health Perspectives published by the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, Dr. Barbara Karn of EPA’s National Center for Environmental Research (NCER) reports how nanoparticles are proving to be a highly effective, cheaper and faster way to decontaminate large-scale toxic waste sites.

The EPA has been looking at the impact of nanoparticles going back at least five years as this report indicates, so the use is not entirely unfamiliar to them. So let’s hope that any remaining issues can soon be resolved because there is a lot of toxic waste sites out there that need to be cleaned up.