In a café at Luton Airport in October 1999, on their way to buy a robot, two scientists had what they describe as 'an epiphany ', writes Gráinne Black
Science is all about asking questions, but sometimes it can lead to practical applications that may never have been imagined. Such was the experience of Dr Declan Gilheany from the Department of Chemistry in UCD and his then student Dr Brian Kelly when they began research into catalyst design.
What began as a basic science project has since developed into a commercial enterprise. "It just shows that a simple curiosity-driven idea can lead to a potentially commercial one," says Gilheany.
"A catalyst is something that you add in a very small quantity to make a chemical reaction go at room temperature, and it helps to avoid noxious by-products," he says. The project involved attempting to synthesize a type of catalyst that had previously proven difficult to make. "It was a hard technical academic thing to do," he says.
They began to experience some success, but "there was no efficiency and there wouldn't have been any real idea of commercialisation at that point", says Gilheany. In order to improve the efficiency of the process, they decided to use a machine or robot to "do the tedious work" of working through the process using all of the different combinations of materials.
In a café at Luton Airport in October 1999 and on their way to buy the robot, they experienced what they describe as "an epiphany". Gilheany and Kelly realised that by using the robot to carry out the reactions, they would "have the capability to make millions of catalysts" and that their research therefore had real commercial potential.
Catalytic converters in car engines use metal catalysts to facilitate chemical reactions that break down pollutants in the exhaust before being released into the air. In this case, the catalyst is a solid and the reaction takes place in the gas phase. This is known as heterogenous catalysis, the reactants and the catalyst are in different phases.
While heterogenous catalysts are very effective in oil refining or car engines, "they can't work in the realm of fine chemistry" such as drug design, explains Gilheany, "where you want fine control at a molecular level". For this type of reaction, homogeneous catalysts are needed.
In homogeneous catalysis, the reactants and the catalyst are in the same phase. In practice, this means that they are all dissolved in the liquid phase, he says. The use of homogeneous catalysis in drug design results in "more efficient greener processes for pharmaceutical production but there aren't many catalysts in the pharmaceutical industry".
Their newly formed Celtic Catalysts is a "start-up company on the brink of getting significant investment" according to Kelly. The company will produce "toolboxes of 20 to 30 catalysts" for sale within the pharmaceutical or fine chemical industries. The time pressures imposed on the process of drug development by the patent system mean that pharmaceutical companies would rather not design catalysts themselves.
"They don't have time to be tinkering with catalysts," explains Kelly. "The clock is ticking all the time on their patent." Pharmaceutical companies can buy one of these readymade "toolboxes" and test out each of the catalysts to see which of them has potential in the making a particular drug. If they find a catalyst that shows promise, the pharmaceutical company can then commission Celtic Catalysts to produce variants on that generic type, in this way finding a catalyst most suitable for their purpose. "This is fine-tuning the whole catalyst discovery process," says Kelly.
A further consequence of patenting is that information relating to drug design is confidential. In order for a catalyst to be designed from scratch, the pharmaceutical company would have to provide details about the drug they are developing. But this system of using toolboxes with a selection of catalysts that can be narrowed down and fine-tuned means that pharmaceutical companies can obtain custom-made catalysts without having to release sensitive information about their products.
Commenting on the evolution of purely academic research into a viable commercial project, Gilheany says, "You just have to go with curiosity because you just don't know where it'll end up."