Seeing Through a Membrane, Clearly
Mar 1st, 2006 | By Penny Sleuth Contributor | Category: Commodities, TechnologyMembranes are boring, right? Wrong — membranes do all kinds of amazing work, separating the things we want from the things we don’t. This ranges from reverse osmosis, which makes salty seawater drinkable, to some really exciting new nanotechnology. One of them could even save your life.
Membranes are amazing things, really. In industrial and food processing applications, they filter out poisons and byproducts. They can also be used to segregate valuable substances from others.
Reverse osmosis, for example, relies on a wonderful membrane that removes salt from water, thereby allowing it to be processed like lake water. It’s good at purifying water so it becomes drinkable. However, the membranes tend to get clogged, and the energy requirement is a staggering 35-50% of the total system cost. Conventional membranes have a variety of hole sizes, which can assure that particles of a certain size don’t pass through. Yet while it means that the wrong particles don’t get through, often neither do the right ones.
Nanotechnology, as you may recall, uses microscopic robots and factories to assemble things molecule by molecule, even atom by atom. The assembly is practically flawless. This means that every hole in a membrane is exactly the right size, therefore, the flow through the membrane is optimized. (In high-volume applications such as water purification, volume of throughput is extremely important.) Here’s why this matters to you.
Most of America’s freshwater — the water we rely upon for drinking and agriculture — comes not from rainfall, but from aquifers. Our aquifers are huge underground oceans of water that are gradually running dry. In fact, we rely upon the Ogallala Aquifer for 20% of our water in the United States, and there’s a serious possibility of it running dry within 15 years. Other aquifers have been contaminated by nuclear power plant emissions and other pollution to the point where the EPA is considering declaring drinking from them hazardous.
Basically, almost all the water on Earth is either salty or polluted. It’s entirely possible that we’ll need to filter all of our drinking water in the near future. (Here in Washington, D.C., for example, it was recently disclosed that city tap water exceeds the legal limits of lead and has for years.) Nanotechnology-based membranes developed by Agua Via, LLC cut the cost of removing salt by 99%. That means the company could cut the cost of purifying water by up to 50%. This could make a big difference in your pocketbook in a few years.
Perhaps an even bigger application is kidney dialysis. Basically, when people have kidney failure, they rely on a huge external machine to do the job of the kidneys. It’s about the size of a washing machine and about as portable. These poor souls have to be hooked up to the machine several hours per day, multiple days per week. Because of how it works, they usually have day and night turned upside down. They’re condemned to this existence for the rest of their lives — which may be short. In addition to the fact that the machines don’t work nearly as well as real kidneys, the suffering this regime imposes leads to a high rate of suicide.
Kidney failure is one of the big three medical costs today. One and a half million people are treated for it in America every year, half of them under age 65. Two million go untreated. The cost per patient is $45,000 annually. There are 14,000 donors for 300,000 people needing transplants. This is a crisis.
Fortunately, a new startup named Biophiltre, LLC has developed a device based on nanotechnology membranes that does the job of a natural kidney. It’s small enough that it could be worn in a small bag under the arm. It’s predicted that people using this device will return to robust health, as if they had their own kidneys again. The team behind this company consists of top nephrology (kidney disease) scientists and medical doctors. You or someone close to you may soon be using this as a lifesaver. Literally.
These two membrane startups are still private, but I’ve become aware of several attractive public nanotechnology companies, and I am tracking them for possible Emerging Capital Report investments.
Jonathan Kolber
March 1, 2006
P.S. Another approach to kidney replacement may be close at hand. Our Transformational Technologies Portfolio holding StemCells, Inc. (STEM:NASDAQ) owns pioneering patents that will probably help it to benefit financially from ALL therapeutic applications of stem cells. Stem cells can, in theory, be grown into any kind of cells needed in the body. Many kinds are already being tested, including STEM’s own liver cell line. Kidney cells are on the horizon, and could replace damaged kidney cells.
