Early this week I attended the Nano and emerging technologies forum in London, a networking conference where the UK’s nanotechnology community got together to discuss the state-of-the-art in this field.

Tony Ryan from the University of Sheffield opened the meeting with the statements: ‘the UK is the powerhouse of nanotechnology’ and ‘nanotechnology and the UK are in a good position to tackle the global grand challenges.’ And this was the message repeated by many others throughout the event.

And the cash is certainly there to support these scientists, with the UK’s research councils ploughing £50 million per year into the area and the Technology strategy board and various centres pledging to add a further £170 million to the pot over the next five years. (more…)

Well, CPhI has certainly been keeping me busy, yesterday involved a whole raft of press conferences and the trek round the conference centre, before dashing back to the hotel to freshen up quickly before going to the annual European Fine Chemicals Group dinner where Ben Thorpe, managing director Healthcare at Goldman Sachs, gave an enthralling after dinner speech about the state of the pharmaceutical industry - and how that affects fine chemical producers.

During the day I spoke to a plethora of companies and had the opportunity to sit down and chat with Gilles Cottier, president of SAFC - who just happened to be serving coffee to visitors to the stand when I turned up! While he predicts SAFC will see low single digit sales growth across the whole year, he is cautious about the outlook for the fine chemical industry in general as consumer confidence is still fragile.

I also got to chat with UK firm Manchester Organics, which specialises in making fluorinated organic molecules for the pharma and agrochem industries. Simon Clayton, director and one of two founders of the company, told me that despite the recession the business was seeing solid growth and it had recently invested around £0.5 million on buying new pressure vessels to conduct the fluorination reactions in and was also moving into microwave synthesis. One of the reasons he gave for the company’s growth was that ‘no one else will touch the fluorinating agent SF₄ as it’s just too dangerous!’

Today I got to chat to Tony Bastock, group managing director of UK-based Contract Chemicals, who told me that the company had had its best year in the last ten - and had revenues of over £25 million, with 65 per cent of those sales coming from exports. The firm, which started as a specialist in bromination chemistry, uses around 2000 tonnes of bromine a year, even thought it now makes a while range of intermediates for pharmaceutical and agrochemical customers.

Well, it’s getting close to that time where I need to head to the airport - and as they say round here: gracias por todo, hasta la vista.

Matt Wilkinson

Well CPhI is certainly large - and that’s an understatement! Its 1500 exhibitors are spread across ten halls and I think I’ll be needing new shoes soon.

So you might think that the news would be coming thick and fast, but it appears the majority of companies I’ve spoken to so far are here for the networking and not to release new products or make big announcements - having said that the press conferences tomorrow may change my opinion!

I did have a fascinating interview with Martin Sonntag, general manager of Dow Wolff Cellulosics, who told me about how ‘business opportunities drive technology’. And how the company has developed technology to ‘elegantly modify’ cellulose so that you can finely control how fast a drug is released from a pill.

Gilles Cottier, president of SAFC, gave a very positive presentation during the SAFC press conference and predicted that even though the division’s sales were down by around 6 per cent in the first half of 2009 compared with the first half of 2008, the company would achieve low single digit growth for the whole of 2009.

The European Fine Chemicals Group (EFCG) press conference focused on its efforts to help the pharma industry avoid buying unsafe ingredients. According to Guy Villax, chief executive of Hovione and member of the board of EFCG, between twenty and thirty per cent of all European active pharmaceutical ingredients (APIs) have falsified purity information!

And if that wasn’t scary enough, he believes the market for falsified medicines is more profitable than heroin - and in most countries is not a crime!

Matt WIlkinson

Well I’m starting to get ready for my trip to CPhI in Madrid next week and I must admit that I won’t be sad to saying goodbye to the damp Autumn that October has so far ushered in to the UK!

Of course, if other tradeshows I’ve been to are anything to go by I won’t being seeing much (if anything) of what I’m told is a beautiful city while I’m there - especially if I’m to get round all 1500 exhibitors…

The show promises to bring together experts from more than 125 countries to discuss the latest trends, developments and innovations in the pharmaceutical industry - and I’ll be doing my best to keep you updated of what I find out via the Chemistry World blog, our Facebook page and our Twitter account

So stay tuned and don’t change the channel!

Matt Wilkinson

Yesterday I blogged about pine cones and wild wheat providing the idea behind a new humidity sensitive material, but this was just one of many interesting nature-inspired materials being discussed at the Euromat 2009 conference this week. On Tuesday I spent most of the day in sessions on biomimetics, and I thought I’d share some titbits with you.

First up is an old favourite of mine – spider silk. There is a huge amount of interest in spider silk due to its incredible strength, and ideally we’d like to use it for applications like bullet proof vests. But unlike silk worms, spiders can’t be farmed. They eat each other you see! So instead scientists have been trying to unravel the mystery behind the materials strength and work out how make it synthetically. John Hardy, a post doc in Thomas Scheibel’s group at University of Bayreuth in Germany, gave us a run down of what they have found out so far and their attempts at fabrication. If you want to learn more, Angewandte Chemie International Edition subscribers can read a recent review by Scheibel. (more…)

The closing of pine cones in response to rain, and the reduction in the angle of the V shaped tops of wild wheat, have been observed for hundreds (or even thousands of years) - but it is only recently that scientists have begun to get to the bottom of why these phenomena occur.

In today’s plenary talk, Peter Fratzl (the director of the Max Plank Institute of Colloids and Interfaces in Potsdam, Germany) gave us an overview of this research field. The mechanical change in both the above examples arises from water causing a non-uniform swelling of the interfaces between the cells in the plant . The cell interfaces on the outer side of the area at the bottom on the V in the wheat plant, or the pine cone segments, swell more than those on the inside – pushing the V together and closing the pine cone needles shut.

Then Peter told us that researchers are in the early stages of copying this mechanism to make materials with anisotropically swelling matrices. One example is a flexible material that is straight when dry, and then reversibly curls up in to a perfect spiral when exposed to humidity. I wonder why nature didn’t design my hair like this – in humidity it turns into an uncontrolled wavy frizz (rather than perfect spiral curls), and it doesn’t go straight again when the humidity drops!

Nina Notman

Saeed Fathi, from Phill Dickens’ group at Loughborough University in the UK, has been telling us about making nylon 6 using inkjet printers for high tech applications.

He uses a recent polymer synthesis concept involving inkjet printing the different components needed in a polymerisation reaction on top of each. The printed inks are then heated to trigger the polymerisation, and make the polymer.

To make nylon 6, Saeed uses two different inks – one containing caprolactam and an initiator, and the other containing caprolactam and a catalyst. So he prints them on top of each other, and after heating for just one minute he was able to make nylon with similar mechanical properties to commercial cast nylon. He does admit however that there are lots of problems to overcome before this process can become commercialised, including the fact it currently needs to be done in an inert/nitrogen atmosphere.

Nina Notman

Yesterday, Peter Goodhew from the University of Liverpool, UK, gave a thought-provoking plenary lecture on how materials science is taught by UK universities.

His main point was that the material scientists being educated today have to be equipped to drive rapid technological innovation for the next 50 years of their working life, and he says he’s not sure universities are currently achieving this. To make his point about the speed technology is advancing, he says that ‘most teenagers have never brought a CD’. He suggests that universities should cover less current hot topics (that will soon go out of date) and instead focus on fundamentals that underpin everything both now and in the future. (more…)

Hip replacements have been carried out since the late 1900s, but over 100 years later there are still performance issues with these and other joint replacements – with many expected to only last 10 years before they need corrective surgery. And, with an ageing population this seems to be becoming an ever increasing (and expensive) problem. (more…)

This week I’m in rainy Glasgow attending the EuroMat 2009 conference, and I found the conference hall this morning (a rather impressive armadillo shaped structure) in my standard way – following people carrying poster tubes around the city!

This morning’s sessions kicked off with a plenary lecture by Ludwig Schultz, from IFW Dresden in Germany, about using superconductors for magnetic levitation. First off we were treated to fun photos of a levitating strawberry and frog, before he moved onto the serious stuff – levitating trains. (more…)