BUSINESS

NANOTECH'S FIRST LINE OF DEFENSE Some nanotech materials firms try to achieve business-as-usual by garnering defense contracts VIVIEN MARX, C&EN NORTHEAST NEWS BUREAU

A I

J

ÛÛ f~\ L L S I Z Z L E ΑΝΌ Ν Ο STEAK: "Vaporware." "Running with another bubble." These are some of the

i name-calling darts thrown at nanotech company Nanosys by analysts, venture capitalists, and nanotech company executives. The derisive chant was under way when Nanosys announced this spring that it was going public and subsided only when the company withdrew the initial public offering (IPO) in August, citing "the volatility of the public capital markets."

Views differ on the event's impact on the nanotech sector. But while Nanosys and its backers regroup, a number of com­panies are choosing to build their business more traditionally without venture capital or an IPO. These companies seek to find and fill a niche—often as defense contrac­

tors —and then move to a larger market. If founded today, NanoSonic, spun out

of Virginia Polytechnic Institute & State University in 1997 by Rick Claus, a pro­fessor of electrical and computer engi­neering, might not carry the hot—some­times too hot—prefix "nano" in its name. "Material-O-Sonic would be fine and just as descriptive," says Claus, who has found­ed 20 companies and enjoys wearing both his academic and entrepreneurial hats.

His small team of polymer chemists and electrical and chemical engineers has de­veloped Metal Rubber, a multilayered, self-assembled nanocomposite made with polymers and metal nanoclusters. The ma­terial, Claus says, is mechanically robust in that it resists wrinkling when deformed, much like rubber, and shows high electri­cal conductivity

TWISTED NanoSonic's Claus (from left), Lalli, and Jeff Mecham demonstrate the flexibility of Metal Rubber, which also is reflective and conducts electricity.

Jennifer Lalli, a polymer chemist who di­rects the company's nanocomposites group, says she joined the company for its creative possibilities and does not see herself as part of the nanotech bubble. She and her col­leagues "find new ways of designing mole­cules and new ways of processing these mol­ecules into nanocomposites," Lalli says. "Wë look at this as well-designed chemistry"

In electrostatic self-assembly a substrate is first dipped in solution with positive ions, rinsed, and then dipped in solution with negative ions. Alternating layers are built up with electrostatic attraction as the glue between layers. A variety of molecules— polymers, metals, metal oxides, biomole-cules—can be stacked with this method.

TRADITIONALLY, Claus explains, only thin films were thought possible through self-assembly He quotes a colleague who said at a scientific meeting: "Self-assembly will really not be of any use for making any­thing larger than a few hundred nanome­ters." Not so, says Claus, who has shown that the stability of the growth process can be controlled and has made tailored, lay­ered materials as thick as 1 cm.

"We were looking for a way to scale up self-assembly into something that is more realistic for actual products—go from nano to macro," he says. "We think that sets us apart from other companies."

The scale-up pertains to material thick­ness and also surface area. Instead of just immersing a 1- X 3-inch microscope slide into a small beaker of solution, Claus, Lal­li, and colleagues have been able to scale the process up to 20 L and can coat a 2- X 2-foot substrate. "This is a big deal," Lalli says. That task entailed figuring out how to alter the nanoparticles' surface chemistry to keep the particles in solution from ag­glomerating, she says.

The company is now seeking to take its method into demanding engineering ap­plications that require concept, design, synthesis, and testing all the way to fabri­cation, integration with other materials,

'That is the next step, moving from big R, little D, to little ft, big 0. That is real development as opposed to a research task/'

H T T P : / / W W W . C E N - O N L I N E . O R G C & E N / O C T O B E R 2 5 , 2 0 0 4 2 1

BUSINESS

N O T G O I N G P U B L I C

Climate Changes After Nanosys Move

Pulling an initial public offering, as Nanosys did in August, happens infrequently. When it does occur, the canceled IPO is usually a slight atmospheric disturbance that

does not rattle investor confidence across an industry. In the young and carefully watched nanotechnology sector, however, Nanosys' about-face felt more like a tropical storm that analysts and start-up executives can begin to assess as the winds die down.

Joshua Wolfe, cofounder of private-equity firm Lux Capital, wants Nanosys to succeed. After all, it is one of Lux's portfolio firms. Wolfe says Nanosys is also one of the "bellwether compa­nies" in nanotech, but he sees no need to rush an IPO. "I think Nanosys' decision to wait for clearer skies in the market said very little about the company and everything about the market," he says, noting that canceled IPOs were endemic this summer. Nanosys was one of 30 companies this year and one of 10 in Au­gust alone to pull its IPO, according to the website Edgar Online.

Nanosys envisions many potential nanotech applications. Founded in 2001, the company charted a course to develop ap­plications in diverse fields such as electronics, memory, and sur­face coatings. Its partners include Matsushita Electric Works, In­tel, and DuPont. The firm's technology and intellectual property involve inorganic nanostructures made of materials such as sili­con, gallium arsenide, or indium phosphide. It is this broad ap­plicability that will make the company, in a positive sense, an "anomaly," Wolfe says.

Comparisons to Nanosys seem to lend contours to a nano-technology's company's self-definition. As Kevin Maloney, chief

executive officer of the start-up QuantumSphere, says of Nanosys, "We have a different philosophy when it comes to R&D: They are more R and we are more D. "

Scott Mize, a former venture capitalist and president of the nanotech think tank Foresight Institute, believes that while the Nanosys IPO might have been "a great boon" that could have helped several nanotech companies, it "might have had unin­tended consequences for the field," he says. The fundamentals of the companies, the lack of products and revenue, would not have supported their stock prices, he says. "That would have been bad for everybody. Investors would have been turned off to nanotech stocks, and so in the long run it could have been very damaging."

The public markets should be used for growth capital for companies with an established business model and a revenue stream, not as a form of venture capital, he adds. "What Nanosys tried to do was go back to the dot-com era when you could raise money on a company that was not ready, when it was too early," Mize says.

"Pioneers get the arrows, and settlers get the land," says Neil Gordon, who is a partner at Sygertech in Montreal and a nanotech consultant. Nanosys, as a company devoted solely to nanotech­nology and made up of academic entrepreneurs, is a pioneer, he says. Among the settlers are such companies as DuPont and Boeing that have been extending into nanotech and integrating the nanoscale into their chemicals and materials without much fanfare. "The pioneers tend to put nano in their name and some­times it helps and sometimes it hurts," Gordon says.

and quality control. "That is the next step, moving from bigR, little D, to little R, big JD," Claus says. "That is real development as opposed to a research task."

Lockheed Martin has taken a liking to

the company's chemistry and sees its po­tential in its own, undisclosed, applications. This summer, Lockheed and NanoSonic entered into a two-year nonexclusive col­laboration of undisclosed financial di­

mensions. On a given day, 20 to 40 po­tential investors contact NanoSonic and close to a dozen venture capitalists have come calling in recent months, Claus says.

There are a number of nanotech com-

2 2 C & E N / O C T O B E R 2 5 . 2 0 0 4

Request more at AdlnfoNow.org H T T P : / / W W W . C E N - O N L I N E . O R G

Synthesis services include: ^m Rare sugars ^ Modified glycochemicals ^m Other chiral molecules

z u C t i e m J n c ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ B | 312-442-4470x4478 ^ ^ synthesis ρ zuChem.com wwraChem.com

ί Products to I make life sweeter^

CUSTOM SYNTHK

discovery

ÎLBaker website

O-ANAIYZED"

"oligonucleotide

100 years of

J.T.Baker iringsite

ULTREX" acids rocks

'west coast distribution facility

ψ integrated circuit

i—Watson &t Crick discover DNÀ structure

—Avery, MacLeod & McCarthy discover DNA

luirr-Nobel Prize ace chemistry

ng discovers penicillin

iernst—Nobel Prize lermochemistry

7^- 19Î2—Grignard—Nobel Prize :.% Crignard reagent *5

incredible advances.

«produced J.T.Baker* has been there

for all of them.

History has never witnessed a more productive period of stunning scientific achievement than the twentieth century. Through it all, I.T.Baker empowered discovery with our high purity, high quality chemicals.

Now we're ready for our second century. Our new products for flash chromatography, Karl Fischer analysis and LC/MS represent an even stronger commitment to discovery. New services such as our Solv-ΓΓ Center*" Knowledge Base let customers quickly tap into our extensive knowledge of chemicals and processes. So while it's true that the last century was impressive just wait until you see what our next hundred years will bring.

* d

p

ο Ι

ο ι

ΙΊΛώα.· ACEKIWYOF EMPOWDUNC DBCCMXl" lAKERMOANAUTZED.- SOW-fT CoMct» UUUBT and the IT l a k e loap art

/

Request more at AdlnfoNow.org

C O D E X I S

M A K E I T H A P P E N

CODEXIS PFIZER EVOLVING TOGETHER

Cal l : US . (610) 648-3995 Europe . · 44(0) 1865 823182

w w w . c o d e x i s . c o m

Recjuest more at AdlnfoNovv.org

DIP IT NanoSonic's Metal Rubber is made as a multilayeredp self-assembled nanocomposite with polymers and metal nanoclusters

Functionalize substrate

#

I ·

Dip in charged solution

Vi Rinse and dip

A1

SSJEBI9 WISUBBE£SSL ^tUlISUBL Alternate

panies finding customers in the defense sector, where there are "interesting prob­lems that require solutions," as Claus puts it. For example, Nanosys' first post-IPO-withdrawal project is a Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) con­tract to develop flexible, low-cost solar cells with an initial one-year phase of $2.2 mil­lion in funding.

QuantumSphere, a company with eight employees in Costa Mesa, Calif., was con­tacted by the military to create better pro-pellants and advanced munitions with higher explosive yields—"a bigger punch with less weight"—as Chief Executive Of­ficer Kevin Maloney says. In August, the company opened a facility to make alu­minum and nickel nanopowders. The first product to find a defense customer is nanoaluminum.

THE FIRM is currently manufacturing around 200 lb of nanoaluminum a month but can ramp up to 2,500 lb per month, ex­plains Douglas Carpenter, the company's chief scientific officer. QuantumSphere ships the powder in cans, and the military takes over the explosive modification and compounding.

QuantumSphere has two main com­petitors, but Carpenter claims they cannot de­liver the volumes or the narrow distribution of particle sizes that his company achieves. For nanoaluminum, parti­cle sizes from 20 to 80 nm can be produced.

The company has adapted a gas-phase condensation method and made it a computer-controlled process in which aluminum is vaporized. By intro­ducing oxygen into the reactor stream, the nanoparticles obtain an aluminum oxide layer and are safer for customers to han­dle, Carpenter explains. icWe can specify both particle size and oxide thickness," he says. "We can control the oxide layer down

"We didn't have a good concept of what a viable product would be; we were opening up virgin territory.

to a few atomic thicknesses of material." QuantumSphere believes its vapor con­

densation technique is readily adaptable. 'Any element with a boiling point within a certain range can be used in our reactor to make nanomaterial," Carpenter ex­plains. "We have made nanozinc, nanocop-per, nanonickel, and nanoaluminum by modifying different parameters of our in­put." The system is modular: Up to seven reactors can go around one collector, Ma­loney says. "The heating elements are in­side the reactor and are really the core tech­nology; they give it scalability"

On the business end, Maloney says his company "a manufacturer of products, not doing pie-in-the-sky research," has two an­gel investors —California Institute of Technology professors who came on board in January 2003. "Our investors are really excited about the fact that we are here rolling up our sleeves. Wé built a reactor, we're producing material, we're working on partnerships, and we're delivering or­ders in October," says Maloney, who grew up near Caltech, took classes there, and has kept close ties with the university

QuantumSphere has become a defense contractor as part of its commercialization strategy and plans to stay true to its military

customers. The real passion for both Car­penter and Maloney, however, is the energy sector. Nanonickel is a replacement for plat­inum, for example, that can potentially reduce the cost of producing hydrogen fuel cells as well as generally im­prove energy storage

possibilities, they say Carpenter believes that demand for nanonickel will eventual­ly exceed that for nanoaluminum.

Nanotech firms like QuantumSphere can look at companies such as Inframat in Farmington, Conn., to see their possible futures. Inframat, founded in 1996 by chemical physicist David Reisner, focuses

H T T P : / / W W W . C E N - O N L I N E . O R G

Organic Intermediates from FMC

Contact Us. We are "more than lithium."

C & E N / O C T O B E R 2 5 , 2 0 0 Λ 2 5

Request more at AdlnfoNow.org

From milligrams to metric tons,from discovery to commercial manufacturing...

Your chemistry needs at each stage of the drug research and development cycle differ dramatically.

Whether your objective is to make analogs, scale-up a lead compound, or produce cGMP material for clinical trials, AMRI provides high quality chemical synthesis from bench to production plant.

No matter what your project goal, or the stage of development, we practice chemistry with a sense of urgency.

Contact us to learn how we can help tip the scale in your favor.

Albany Molecular Research. Incf 21 Corporate Circle, PO Box 15098 · Albany, NY 12212-5098 USA Phone:518-464-0279 · Fax:518-464-0289 · www.albmolKular.com

Request more at AdlnfoNow.org

[Chemistry on any scale

"We were looking for a way to scale up self-assembly into something that is more realistic for actual products—go from nano to macro/'

POWERED UP QuantumSphere makes metallic nanopowders for the military and, potentially, for energy storage. The reactor is on the right; the collector, on the left.

on nanostructured materials. The firm has used government R&D contracts from, among others, the Air Force, DARPA, the Environmental Protection Agency, and the National Aeronautics & Space Adminis­tration as bootstrap financing for its busi­ness. "Materials companies generally do not qualify for venture capital, for private investment, in the early going, because the development times for materials are so long," Reisner says. It can take 20 years to bring a new material from initial concept to actual placement in an original-equip­ment-manufacturer product.

Inframat's intellectual property revolves around low-cost wet chemistry for syn­thesizing nanomaterials coupled with a thermal spray technique using nanoscale grains to create nanocoatings. Its 2,500-sq-ft thermal spray facility is leased from near­by University of Connecticut.

The firm began working on ceramic nanocoatings for the Navy in 1997 This past summer, minesweeper boats with In-framat's ceramic nanocoatings on propeller and propulsion shafts were pulled out of

the Persian Gulf and checked. As Reisner says, after three years of use in a war the­ater, the coatings "showed no signs of wear."TThe company's product has received official certification by the Navy for ship­board repair of moving parts, "a nanotech first," he says.

No venture capitalist would have fund­ed that kind of work, Reisner maintains, because the exact degree to which the nanocoating would enhance material properties was not foreseeable. "We did not have a good concept of what a viable product would be; we were opening up virgin territory"

CERAMIC NANOCOATINGS are not the kind of products that give a huge return on investment quickly, Reisner points out, although they could ultimately become a $100 million business. Other products based on this technology are thermal-bar­rier coatings for hot sections of jet engines and land-based turbines. Future applica­tions include medical prostheses such as hip and knee joints. "That is a huge mar­ketplace, and we have got a huge compa­ny that is very aggressively pursuing us for exclusive licensing," Reisner claims.

Government R&D helped to generate revenues at Inframat and also created a tech­nology platform that can serve, in Reisner's words, "as a springboard by which a multi­tude of products can emerge."The compa­ny is now pursuing different strategies for its technologies—its own manufacturing projects as well as licensing opportunities. It recently formed a subsidiary, Inframat Advanced Materials, for the commercial­ization and sales of its materials.

The military has an interest in funding dual-use technology As Reisner explains, the practice gives companies incentive to develop military technology that later can be deployed in the commercial market­place. "Then the economics will be favor­able, because the military can buy from the company at commercial prices," he says.

Nanosys' IPO cancellation, Reisner be­lieves, has done materials companies in the nanotech sector a favor. "We have been teasing all these investors for the last cou­ple of years that nanotech is the next big thing, and I think it is. But they have pent up demand to make investments." Such in­vestors, he believes, will now be looking for companies with sound fundamentals. • -

H T T P : / / W W W . C E N - 0 N L I N E . O R G

Specialty Phosphines from FMC

• ί-n.ible Sti l le. Su /nk i . ί KM k. Ntv;ishi <ind S o n n ^ i s h i u rr. ict ions

• Uso of <]ivl ("filor'uios vs. hromuies

• hicftsisi1 ('(iUilvst turnover ;nui off ir ΚΜΗΛ' pmdurmt1, higher ν ι ο I c i s

Now Available

Contact Us. We are "more than lithium."

Request more at AdlnfoNow.org

C&EN / OCTOBER 25 200Λ 27