The platform’s success will be measured according to the planned final position on the S-curve for each of the six envisioned segments below.
The platform activities follow the S-curve relation between road to market and resources needed.
During the project each application will move on the S-curve according to how much the platform activities will bring them closer to market during the funding period.
For both the industrial wastewater treatment (WP1) and proteomics concentration (WP2) activities the success criterion is sales of fully developed technology.
For the biorefinery (WP3) and fertigation (WP4) application the success criterion is completed technology demonstrations.
For the hERG (WP5) and GPCR (WP6) drug screening application the success criterion is to have feasibility proof-of-concept of protein reconstitution into biomimetic membranes.
Osmotic membrane extraction (OsE):
In production industries, the need for new water treatment solutions is primarily
driven by the desire to reduce operational costs. Osmotic membrane extraction (OsE)
solutions deliver operational cost reductions through significant energy reductions
combined with the improved ability to handle ‘difficult’ (high turbidity and/or temperature
sensitive) process streams and to recover valuable resources from these steams with sustainable
advantages. This includes the production of extracted water/up-concentrated solutions leading
to direct cost advantages in a wide range of production processes including pharmaceutical
peptide up-concentration, production of liquid fertilizer from seawater, biorefining, and
reduction of waste-water stream volumes.
We will focus on four industrial segments of the OsE market: 1) industrial waste water volume reduction, 2) peptide up-concentration, 3) fertigator production and 4) biorefinery optimization.
Drug screening (DrS):
In pharmaceutical industries, the need for new drug screening solutions is primarily
driven by the desire to increase screening throughput rate while at the same time
lowering the overall cost of screening. With the unique scalable and cell-free
membrane protein-hosting platform in the drug screening (DrS) solution, the pharmaceutical
industries will be able to increase research and development effectiveness (speed, volume,
and reproducibility) and lower the overall cost in screening processes of membrane protein
drug targets constituting 70% of all drug targets [1]. Specific targets are hERG ion channels
and GPCR proteins. This will lead to faster early elimination of false leads resulting in
reduction of development costs and faster times to market benefitting the patients (end users)
with advanced and more effective drugs.
We will focus on providing proof-of-concept for two DrS segments in the form of
membrane based systems for 1)
high-throughput hERG ion channel cardiac safety screening, and
2)
screening/sensing with GPCRs.
The two key application areas (OsE and DrS) originates from the same platform technology, yet shows huge potential market impacts in two distinct industrial markets. The markets are chosen as part of a strategy to distribute the commercial risk, in two strong research linked areas – this will additionally increase platform viability beyond the funding period.